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.