Torquay author wins top award at London Book Fair

A Torquay author has won a top award at the annual London Book Fair.

Jason Mann’s Cornish mystery The Echoing Shore was announced as the 2025 winner of the Selfies Adult Fiction Award in front of an audience of some of the UK’s leading companies involved in publishing. The judges described it as a pacy, absorbing story “that delivers to the very end”.

Jason, who lives on Babbacombe Road, Torquay, and writes under the name J H Mann, is a shore-based volunteer for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and a South West journalist.

He said: “The London Book Fair is one of the largest events of its type in the world, so it was a tremendous honour to receive this award. I couldn’t believe it when I heard I’d won. It was one of those very special moments in my writing career that I will never forget.”

Above: J H Mann with his book

The Echoing Shore tells the story of Kate Tregillis, the editor of a small newspaper on the brink of closure, who becomes obsessed with solving a longstanding mystery – the loss of the local lifeboat ten years earlier. In exposing the truth, she risks the future of her newspaper and even her life – and learns that the man she loves has his own secrets.

The story is set in the fictional fishing community of St Branok, though some of the locations in the book do exist, such as the seaside town of Perranporth and the ancient stone circle at Bowcawen-un. It was also an award winner at the international 2023 Yeovil Literary Prize, one of the UK’s longest-established novel competitions.

Jason added: “I wanted the story to bring out not only the raw majesty and beauty of Cornwall but also the deprivations that exist in many rural areas and small coastal towns. Cornwall has always been a special place for me. I have swum and surfed there much of my life, and, in fact, my dad was one of Cornwall's early lifeguards.”

He is now working on a 19th-century Cornish historical mystery called The Silver Tide. It is set in the same fictitious Cornish fishing town as The Echoing Shore but more than a century earlier.

It was again inspired by a variety of true stories, including one about a young woman called Margaret Brown who saw her fisherman father and three brothers die in a summer storm and then went on to help establish the local community’s first lifeboat.

The Echoing Shore is available on Amazon in ebook and paperback formats