New Patron of Reading revealed

After a week of teasers from Mrs Harding, we are thrilled to finally reveal the popular and critically-acclaimed author, Sarah Crossan, as our Patron of Reading for the upcoming academic year. Sarah will take over from this year’s Patron, Mike Revell. 

Sarah’s books for young people are amongst the most popular in our school library, with her latest verse novel, ‘Toffee’ winning our Teen School Book Award in 2020. Sarah won the Carnegie Medal and the YA Book Prize for ‘One’, her verse novel about conjoined twins, and was the Irish Children’s Laureate (Laureate na nÓg) from 2018-2020.

Mrs Harding ran a competition this week for pupils to try to guess the identity of the new Patron from a series of clues. Joshua Thomas (L6GRO) and King Chalapati (L6GRO) worked together to guess the correct answer after just five of the eight clues and Mrs Harding rewarded them this morning with Haribo! 

Sarah sent us a video to play to students, in which she talked about how excited she is to be taking on the role and described Mrs Harding as “the most persuasive librarian in the country” for convincing her that the relationship with the school could work even at a few hundred miles distance.

Mrs Harding has lots of ideas for the year ahead: “We are very excited about working remotely with Sarah to continue to develop our school’s reading culture and also look forward to welcoming her into school in person sometime next year.”