OXFORD author Siobhan Dowd yesterday became the first person to posthumously win Britain’s most prestigious children’s book prize.

Ms Dowd died of cancer two years ago and her Carnegie Medal win was last night hailed as a fitting tribute to the tragic author.

Ms Dowd, who lived in West Oxford, joins a children’s literary hall of fame, which includes CS Lewis, Philip Pullman, Mary Norton and Noel Streatfield.

In the last days of her life at Sobell House hospice, she set up the Siobhan Dowd Trust to use her royalties to “bring the joy of reading and books to children and young people deprived of access to books and the opportunity to read”.

It is hoped the publicity from the Carnegie win will boost the trust.

Her Oxford publisher David Fickling said after yesterday’s announcement: “This is the greatest endorsement of the quality of Siobhan’s writing yet.”

Ms Dowd, who was half Irish, won the prize for her book Bog Child, set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s at the height of the Troubles, and described by the judging panel as “profoundly heart-warming” and “a novel of great humanity”.

Mr Fickling said: “She delivered, in two years nine months, four spectacularly good books. This one is a brilliant book — it’s funny, it’s serious and it’s very uplifting.

“You finish all of Siobhan’s books grinning, and that’s an art, to leave the reader like that.”

He used the awards ceremony to make an impassioned speech brandng library service cuts “a public disgrace”, saying she would have been heartbroken by the number of young people deprived of access to books.

Mr Fickling, whose office is in Beaumont Street, paid tribute to “one of the most talented writers he had ever worked with”.

Ms Dowd’s three sisters, Oonagh, Denise and Enda received the award in London.

He also talked of Ms Dowd’s despair that there were children in the UK and Ireland who have no access to books. Her interest in deprived readers sprang from her job with the writer’s charity, Pen. She co-founded the Readers & Writers Programme, taking authors into schools in socially deprived areas, prisons, young offenders’ institutions and community projects. In 2004, she was appointed deputy commissioner for children’s rights for Oxfordshire.

She started writing in 2003 after moving to Oxford with her husband Geoff Morgan. All four of her novels have won awards.

In 2007 her first, A Swift Pure Cry, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

This is the first time in its 72-year history that the prize has been awarded posthumously.

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