Patrice Lawrence

Patrice Lawrence is an award-winning writer. Her debut YA novel, Orangeboy (Hachette), won the Bookseller YA Prize and the Waterstones Prize for Older Children’s Fiction and was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award. Her subsequent novels have been much acclaimed and frequent visitors to prize lists including the Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult Prize 2021 and the YA Book Prize 2021. Needle (Barrington Stoke) was shortlisted for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing 2023 and winner of the 2023 Little Rebels Award.

Lawrence was born in Brighton, raised in an Italian-Trinidadian family in mid-Sussex, and now lives on the South Coast. She was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2021.