There is Tristram Shandy, there is Gravity’s Rainbow, there is Slaughterhouse Five. To this list of Post-Modern works we can now add Grubtown Tales: Stinking Rich and Just Plain Stinky, in which the author pauses for several pages to have a bath, and Mr Pusskins Best in Show, by Sam Lloyd, about a cat who wins a talent show.

Both were winners of The Roald Dahl Funny Prize yesterday, as judges hailed a new age of Post-Modernism in children’s literature. Michael Rosen, a former Children’s Laureate who chaired the judging panel, said this year’s submissions showed that “children’s books have discovered Post-Modernism”.

However, traditionalists can be assured that underpants are still a regular theme, as are diaries kept by young girls, burps, oddball uncles and dogs’ bottoms.

Among the shortlisted works for the two categories of children aged under 6 and children aged 7 to 14, were stories that referenced other stories and stories that mock the conventions of storytelling, both basic elements of the Post-Modern style.

In Grubtown Tales the author Philip Ardagh appears as “Beardy Ardagh”, and engages in a long-running argument throughout the story with a fictional publisher called Paltry Feedback.

In the younger category, The Pencil, by Allan Ahlberg, is a meditation on the act of storytelling itself. The lead character is a writing implement, a pencil. Later a rubber appears, and proceeds to erase parts of the story, like the American artist Robert Rauschenberg erasing a drawing by Willem de Kooning.

Newspaper stories pop up frequently, as in the story of Mr Pusskins, and so do references to other stories. Octopus Socktopus by Nick Sharratt, (less a story and more a series of octopus-based puns), includes “Goldilocktopus”, after the 19th-century tale about a blonde porridge thief.

Mr Rosen, who founded the Funny Prize in an effort to stimulate humorous children’s writing, welcomed the development.

He said: “In children’s books it is all about the process of the work. They are constantly quoting each other. One on the short list is about a kid who nicks a poem, and then meets the poet” — a reference to The Galloping Ghost by Hilda Offen — “and there are stories about stories.” he said. “They draw attention to the process of writing itself, which is pure Post-Modernism.”

Elements of Post-Modernism have appeared in other children’s stories. Anthony Horowitz had his young hero Alex Rider conceal a weapon inside a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Andy Stanton, winner of the Roald Dahl prize last year and on the judging panel this year, noted the proliferation of “ironic superheroes”. He said: “We are living in a post-Simpsons world.”

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