Bog Child Wins Carnegie Medal for Children's Literature

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd, which was "finished three months before her death from cancer," won the Carnegie medal for children's literature, making the author the first posthumous winner of the award, the Guardian reported (click here for more details).

Bog Child, the story of a teenage boy who finds the body of a child in an Irish bog, was finished by Dowd in May 2007. She died of cancer that August at the age of 47, having only turned to writing in 2003. In just four short years, she penned four children's books: her first, A Swift Pure Cry, was also shortlisted for the Carnegie. Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, planned as the first in a series, won her the major Irish children's fiction prize, the Bisto award, which she also picked up last month, for the second year running, for Bog Child.

Librarian and chair of the judging panel Joy Court called the book "an absolutely astonishing piece of writing. To be able to write like that when she was going through what she was going through is just astonishing--the sheer beauty of the language, the descriptions of the environment; she has such an amazing sense of place."