Carnegie Medal (literary award) in the context of "The Graveyard Book"

Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman (born 19 October 1946) is an English writer. He is best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. The first volume, Northern Lights (1995), won the Carnegie Medal and later the "Carnegie of Carnegies". The third volume, The Amber Spyglass (2000), won the Whitbread Award. In 2003, His Dark Materials ranked third in the BBC's The Big Read, a poll of 200 top novels voted by the British public. In 2017, he started a companion trilogy, The Book of Dust. As of 2025, the books in the two trilogies plus related short stories have sold more than 49 million copies in total.

In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". In a 2004 BBC poll, he was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture. He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to literature. Michael Morpurgo said: “The range and depth of his imagination and of his learning certainly make him the Tolkien of our day.”

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children's fantasy novel by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published in 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. It is recognized as a classic in children's literature and is one of the best-selling books of all time, with over 100 million copies sold.

The Hobbit is set in Middle-earth and follows home-loving Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit who joins the wizard Gandalf and the thirteen dwarves of Thorin's Company on a quest to reclaim the dwarves' home and treasure from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo's journey takes him from his peaceful rural surroundings into more sinister territory.

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (/ˈɡeɪmən/; born Neil Richard Gaiman; 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, audio theatre, and screenplays. His works include the comic series The Sandman (1989–1996) and the novels Good Omens (1990), Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005), The Graveyard Book (2008) and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013). He co-created the TV adaptations of Good Omens and The Sandman.

Gaiman's awards include Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards and Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards, and it was adapted into an acclaimed stage play at the Royal National Theatre in London.

His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights (1995; published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. In 2003, the trilogy was ranked third on the BBC's The Big Read poll.

Although His Dark Materials has been marketed as young adult fiction, and the central characters are children, Pullman wrote with no target audience in mind. The fantasy elements include witches and armoured polar bears; the trilogy also alludes to concepts from physics, philosophy, and theology. It functions in part as a retelling and inversion of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, with Pullman commending humanity for what Milton saw as its most tragic failing, original sin. The trilogy has attracted controversy for its criticism of religion. By 2024, more than 22 million copies of the novels had been sold in 50 countries, and they had been translated into 40 languages.