Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

This week, the Carnegie medal was awarded to Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite writers, for his wonderful The Graveyard Book.

It’s well worth checking out, if you haven’t already. In fact, it has already won the Newberry medal — the US equivalent to the Carnegie. This medal makes him the first person in history to win both for the same book.

And I can’t think of a better book to have won it. The Graveyard Book is about a boy whose family is murdered in the dead of night, but he – then a toddler – wandered out of the house and up a hill into a graveyard.

There, he is raised by ghosts and a vampire, living with and being taught by the dead. It’s a remarkable book, based on and inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

But one of the fantastic things about these awards is that the shortlist often consists of a number of authors that I haven’t heard of. While there are some that I’ve seen, some that I’ve read, it’s a joy to discover altogether new books by altogether new authors – most of which are wonderful.

There is a video up here where you can see the winner being read out and hear his acceptance speech.

Some of what he says on cutting library funds is particularly poignant. Cutting library money, he says, might be easy, but it is also “stealing from the future” to help remedy today.

In the world of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, television is a god; a new god, rising up to challenge the rule of the old Norse ones: television, and with it electricity, and anything that is so idolised and worshipped in today’s society that it could become a being in its own right. A man might be television like Mars, living and walking and breathing, was the god of war. An intriguing and compelling interpretation of today’s society, certainly; a society where video games are blamed for any wrongdoing and television is turning everyone into vegetables.

So often, we here of television being portrayed in a negative light. But here is something different. Here, a boy was lost in the wild after being separated from his family, but after watching Bear Grylls on TV, he managed to survive. All the hours spent watching television had bestowed on him a number of tricks: tricks like leaving clues, and following the creek to get to the lake. They helped in his rescue, providing a trail that others could follow. And now, thankfully, he is back home, and returning to some semblance of normality.

There is another feel-good piece of news here, where a boy has appeared in Superman, and indeed has had the entire episode named after him: “The Kid Who Saved Superman.”

And it all happened because he wrote an essay. It’s a story about inspiration, and hope, and strength; a story about all the ingredients that, in real life, combine to make someone a hero. To Hakeem, his teacher is his hero. Not only does that make this a moving story about a student who idolises his teacher, it is a heart-warming example of what can be accomplished if you go to school and work hard. Hakeem himself perhaps said it best: If you go to school and do good, good will come out of it.

Indeed, you might have your own comic book.