The winner of this year’s Carnegie Medal for an outstanding book for children is a vile and dangerous story.

The Bunker Diary: why wish this book on a child?

The winner of this year’s Carnegie Medal for an outstanding book for children is a vile and dangerous story. Kevin Brooks’s book contains heroin addiction, attempted rape, torture and murder

Carnegie Prize winner: Kevin Brooks shoehorns every contentious issue into a single narrative Photo: Geoff Pugh/The Telegraph

By Lorna Bradbury

The Telegraph - 24 June 2014

Like the judges of most book prizes, the Carnegie Medal panel can’t resist a controversy. And Kevin Brooks’s The Bunker Diary, which has won this year’s award, shoehorns every contentious issue into a single narrative. Here we have heroin addiction, attempted rape, physical and mental abuse, torture, murder and enforced imprisonment. It brings to mind soaps such as EastEnders or Coronation Street in the way it deliberately crams in a series of provocative plot-lines designed to rake in the viewers.

The Carnegie Medal is Britain’s most prestigious children’s book prize and has long caused a fuss in literary circles. Ever since Melvin Burgess scooped the award in 1996 with Junk, a dark account of two teenage runaways who become squatters and drug addicts, accusations of unsuitability have dogged it.

The same criticism was made of last year’s winner, Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner, a dystopian fable set in an alternative version of the Fifties that dramatised the perils of totalitarianism. It was said too of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls – which won the previous year – a harrowing tale about a boy who watches his mother die of cancer. But these books were affecting, powerful stories, written by two of the best children’s writers around – and I cheered when they scooped the prize.

But I don’t feel the same about The Bunker Diary, which has all the hallmarks of an issue-led discussion piece rather than a literary novel, and seems to have won on shock value rather than merit.
More


And over at The Guardian:
Carnegie medal under fire after 'vile and dangerous' Bunker Diary wins

Kevin Brooks's novel for young adults as unsuitable for children following resounding acclaim from prize judges