AN AUTHOR who grew up on Oxford’s Blackbird Leys estate is in line for a £30,000 prize for retelling one of the most moving accounts of life in the Second World War.

Sharon Dogar has been shortlisted for a prestigious Costa Book Award for her reimagining of the story of Anne Frank.

Anne Frank’s diary, written by an adolescent Jewish girl while hiding from the Nazis in a Dutch attic, inspired Ms Dogar’s novel for teenagers, Annexed, which is one of four books being considered for the children’s category of the awards.

Ms Dogar, 47, who lives in Summertown, said she had wanted to be a writer since she was four and was encouraged by three teachers at Ivanhoe Middle School in Blackbird Leys, who, remarkably, all went on to publishing success – the poet John Foster; Rod Hunt of Oxford Reading Tree; and His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman, whose wife Jude later encouraged Ms Dogar’s writing.

After studying English literature and comparative religion in London, Mrs Dogar travelled round Pakistan on her own and then came back to Oxford, where she married and raised three children.

Speaking of the shortlisting, she said: “It’s wonderful. You spend your time as a writer in your own world and when something like this happens you realise that there are readers out there, listening.”

Anne’s diary ends on August 4, 1944, but Annexed is told from the point of view of her friend Peter, relating his life after their betrayal and in the Nazi death camps where he died. The novel, which opens with Peter on the point of death, is told as a series of diary entries interspersed with the thoughts of the dying boy.

Its inclusion of the teenager’s sexual feelings was criticised by the Anne Frank Trust, which accused the author of using “21st-century mores”, saying that young people were not sexualised in the 1940s as they are today.

However, the judges of the Costa children’s section, who included TV chatshow host Lorraine Kelly, described it as “a brave re-imagining of a harrowing story and an iconic figure”.

Sam Willets, on the poetry shortlist, is a reformed heroin addict who spent most of his life in Oxford.

After reading English at Wadham College, he worked as a teacher, journalist and travel writer. He is shortlisted for his first poetry collection, New Light for the Old Dark.

Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on Wednesday, January 5.

The overall winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2010 will receive £30,000 and will be announced on Tuesday, January 25.