Fame beyond the grave

Nicolette Jones surveys the writers who made their mark posthumously, including Siobhan Dowd, the winner of the Carnegie Medal Last week, Siobhan Dowd won the CILIP Carnegie Medal for Bog Child. It was the last book she wrote, but the first of two that have been published posthumously. She died of breast cancer in August 2007, a few months after her first published novel, A Swift Pure Cry, won the Branford Boase Award. (I was one of the judges.) That prize was set up in memory of the acclaimed children’s author Henrietta Branford, and of her editor Wendy Boase, both of whom died of cancer in 1999. At the Branford Boase prize ceremony in 2007, Siobhan Dowd said: “Henrietta Branford had a razor-sharp intellect and compelling honesty in her writing. Fire, Bed and Bone, which I’ve just finished, leaves me mourning the books that... [read full story]                    

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