Sarah Crossan’s One, a novel in free verse about conjoined twins Grace and Tippi, has beaten a host of award-winning writers to take the £2,000 YA book prize.
The shortlist included two-time Carnegie medal winner Patrick Ness’s latest title The Rest of Us Just Live Here, and Frances Hardinge’s Costa book of the year winner The Lie Tree. But One “stood head and shoulders above some extremely tough competition this year”, according to judge and Eason youth book buyer David O’Callaghan.
Already the winner of the Irish children’s book of the year award, One is also in the running for the Carnegie, the UK’s top prize for children’s fiction. The YA book prize, launched by the Bookseller magazine last year, is the only award in the UK and Ireland to focus specifically on young adult literature. One was among 10 novels shortlisted for this year’s award, alongside works including Holly Bourne’s Am I Normal Yet? and Jenny Downham’s Unbecoming.
O’Callaghan called One beautifully written and “wholly original”, while his fellow judge, Hay festival director Peter Florence, said it was “a book that breaks every rule and would enthral any reader; a book that gives you the gift of reading in a new way”.
“Tippi and I are of the ischiopagus tripus variety.
We have
two heads,
two hearts,
two sets of lungs and kidneys.
We have four arms as well,
and a pair of fully functioning legs
now that the vestigial leg has been
docked
like a show dog’s tail,” writes Crossan.
“It probably sounds like a prison sentence,
but we have it better than others
who live with fused heads or hearts,
or only two arms between them.”
Crossan, who is originally from Dublin and now lives in Hertfordshire, has said that she was inspired to write the novel after watching a documentary about Minnesotan conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel. She “was immediately captivated by the idea of their lives – fascinated by the ways in which these amazing women managed to live as two separate people in one body”, she wrote in a piece for the Guardian children’s books site last year. “I wanted to tell it honestly and accurately, because the more the I read, the more I realised how misunderstood the lives of these people have been, and how ready people seem to be to say: ‘If it were me, I would want to be separated,’ without ever fully considering the intimacy of such a relationship, not to mention the many joys it brings.”
Crossan was given her award at the Hay festival on Thursday afternoon by the former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman. The ceremony also saw the author Melvin Burgess given a special achievement prize to mark the 20th anniversary of his young adult novel Junk. Charlotte Eyre, children’s editor of the Bookseller and chair of the YA book prize, called Burgess “a pioneer of the UK young adult movement”, adding that Junk, about a group of teenagers who are addicted to drugs, “kickstarted the movement to publish books for teenagers”.
