Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, the first volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has been voted the “Carnegie of Carnegies” in a poll to celebrate 70 years of the award now called the CILIP Carnegie Medal (from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals; the winner is chosen annually by a panel of librarians). Pullman received 40 per cent of the public’s online vote; his nearest rival, Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, received 16 per cent. Voters chose from a top 10 list of books selected by an expert panel. (For more details of the top ten, and past winners see: www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/livingarchive.)

The Carnegie was remarkable in recognising the quality of Northern Lights in 1995, when the book had not received a great deal of attention. It was overlooked that year by the other significant children’s book prizes, including the Whitbread Children’s Novel Prize. Ironically, the third book of Pullman’s trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, went on to win that award in 2002 along with the overall Whitbread Book of the Year prize.

Northern Lights, which follows the adventurous journey to the frozen north of Lyra Belacqua, ward of an Oxford college in a parallel universe both like and unlike our own, is epic, complex and sophisticated. In Scandinavia, the book was first published as an adult book. This, and its sequels, The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2001), earned Pullman a reputation not only as a great storyteller but also as an atheist spokesman since the forces of evil in the trilogy are embodied in an authority that resembles the church. Nonetheless, readers have found in the trilogy a strong spiritual element, considering as it does the nature of the soul and the idea of sin. Pullman was inspired by Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, particularly in the way he brings abstract concepts to life: in Northern Lights, for instance, daemons, or animal spirits attached to humans, express, externally, their souls. The book has a rich cast of fantastical characters, including armoured bears and beautiful witches, reprised, along with fatal spectres and cliff-ghasts, in the sequels.

Among Pullman’s other notable works are the sophisticated sequence of Victorian pastiches that begins with Ruby in the Smoke (recently televised starring Billie Piper), the exotic fantasy The Firework Maker’s Daughter, and books for younger readers:The Scarecrow and the Servant, a Don Quixote for kids; Count Karlstein, a melodrama that originated as a school play from Pullman’s days as a teacher; and I Was a Rat!, which gives the Cinderella story a new twist .

Pullman, who could not attend the Carnegie ceremony because he was receiving an honorary degree in Scotland, said of his success: “It is without any question the most important honour I have ever received, and the one I treasure the most.” The film of Northern Lights opens in September as The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.

Nicolette Jones is the children’s books reviewer of The Sunday Times and chaired the committee that chose the Carnegie of Carnegies Top Ten

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