It was a close-run thing, but after plenty of argument the judges have decided on the winner of the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize. The award — the only national prize for teenage fiction — goes to Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing.

It is the flesh-crawling, Gothic tale of an alcoholic woodcutter and his son, Peter, living deep in the woods. Something is hunting them for the contents of a battered box they carry, and it is getting closer. Only a particular sword can help them in a remote village where the living are preyed upon by the dead — but how to tell the difference?

Sedgwick (above), 39, is by day sales manager for Walker Books, by night a prize-winning author of seven novels. He is drawn to bleak Eastern European landscapes. His parents ran an English language school, and his mother read them Swallows and Amazons (which inspired his Blood Red, Snow White, about Arthur Ransome's experience of the Russian Revolution.)

“I read maths and politics at university, and had no idea what to do until I worked in the Cambridge branch of Heffers bookshop, in the children's department,” Sedgwick says. He began writing in 1993, just before the explosion in children's fiction, with “the two biggest influences on me being Peter Dickinson and Susan Cooper”.

Sedgwick has produced some strikingly original books, including Floodlands, in which a girl searches for her family, lost when global warming has caused much of Britain to sink under water. My Swordhand is Singing is a reworking of vampire myths. Its menace, mingled with romance, make it a heart-stopping read.

Crossing boundaries and generations, Sedgwick's life on both commercial and creative sides of fiction make him a particularly interesting winner.

My Swordhand is Singing by Marcus Sedgwick

Orion, £6.99; 224pp

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