Frances Hardinge’s Costa triumph is a big win for all YA authors

"It does sort of feel like the world's just discovered your secret, doesn't it?" young adult author Patrick Ness tweeted this morning in relation to his fellow YA author, Frances Hardinge, winning the Costa Book of the Year award last night with her seventh novel, The Lie Tree (Macmillan, 2015). Ness's praise for the book – "Brilliant: dark, thrilling, utterly original" – appears on the front cover, but even without this boost the book would have been well received.

Hardinge has been making waves in children’s YA fiction since her first novel, Fly By Night, was published in 2005 (also Macmillan); it won the prestigious Branford Boase Award for debuts and set the tone for her subsequent fantasy-adventure novels: imperfect protagonists, compellingly-drawn settings and smart, witty, elegant prose.

In an interview with Children's Books Ireland's Inis magazine in 2014, she noted, "I have always had a love of tricksters and characters who find ways to live outside the usual rules . . . I am not a fan of Chosen Ones, or individuals who are given everything they need by Destiny. I want a protagonist who picks Destiny's pocket, or finds loopholes in an unwinnable game."

Faith, the 14-year-old protagonist of the prizewinning The Lie Tree, certainly falls into this category. An aspiring natural scientist, she is an unlikely heroine in a world where girls are “not supposed to be hungry” for food or knowledge. Caught between childhood and adulthood, she thinks of herself as a mermaid: “Until she dragged herself up on the rock of marriage, she was difficult.” Despite her love for science, she is also damned by it; she is told women’s skulls are smaller, lesser, and reflects that “science had weighed her, labelled her, and found her wanting”.

But Faith is clever, despite any acknowledgement of this on her part being unthinkable, and also, after her father's sudden death, heartbroken. This combination of intellect and raw emotion makes her a passionate, if flawed, candidate to investigate what may or may be his murder. Hardinge specialises in compelling and complex female characters, from Tris in Cuckoo Song to Mosca in Fly By Night and Twilight Robbery. And so one can understand how authors familiar with Hardinge – particularly those in the children's and YA community, who were utterly delighted with the Tuesday night announcement – are surprised not that it is a good book praised by the chair of judges, James Heneage, as "an important book" that "brilliantly articulates what goes on in a clever 14-year-old girl's mind", but that the judges have recognised someone already known in her field as a talented and thought-provoking writer.

In Ireland last year, the Children & Young Adult sector accounted for 29 per cent of the market, according to Nielsen Bookscan, with four of the top 10 titles falling into this category. In UK it comprised 24 per cent of the market, again with four titles in the top 10. This share has been growing year on year, evident in expanded sections in bookshops, the number of movie adaptations (complete with merchandise) in the YA sector, and an ever-increasing sense that perhaps books for younger readers might actually be – well, decent.

Readers of these books already know this. It’s when newcomers to the field – or perhaps older readers daring to try a children’s or YA novel for the first time since they left their teens – start realising this that we see things happening. Hardinge winning a prize over her adult-focused peers Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney) or Kate Atkinson (A God in Ruins) is a rare occurrence. The prize (then known as the Whitbread) last – and indeed first – went to a children’s author in 2001, for Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass. It also made the Booker longlist, the first time a children’s book had ever made that list.

This win is undeniably a huge coup for Hardinge – in addition to the £30,000 prize fund, sales of this book and her previous titles are likely to soar – but it is also a victory for the children’s and YA book world as a whole. People often comment on the “friendliness” in children’s books, the “supportive community” for writers and readers, without acknowledging quite why this is: nothing bonds people together like not being taken seriously about something they know to be valuable and worthwhile.

The Lie Tree falls into that category, and not simply because it is incredibly readable, with a plot that zips and twists through secrets and deceit without sacrificing the quality of prose; not simply because it skilfully blends genres (it is a coming-of-age murder mystery in a post-Darwin world, where the symbiotic Tree of the title blurs the lines between science and superstition); not simply because it invites us to question our own place in the universe and the role of truth and lies in our lives. It is valuable and worthwhile because it is all of those things – a tricky feat for any author – and that its central protagonist is a teenage girl (thus implying that its readers must be mostly teenage girls) is almost incidental.

Except, in the world we live in, much like how Faith is reminded of her subordinate role in society, we have not yet reached the point where it is completely irrelevant that a prizewinner happens to be a novel published for young readers. In her acceptance speech, in her trademark fedora, Hardinge compared winning the award to being in a dream she didn’t quite want to wake up from. She thanked the judges “for giving the lie to what a lot of us were sagely muttering – oh, a children’s book never gets it”, confessing that she herself was among them, before inviting the general reader to explore that world: “there’s a beautiful jungle out there.” Readers willing to venture on this expedition will find that The Lie Tree, accomplished though it is, is only one of many literary fruits worth tasting.

Claire Hennessy is a writer, editor and creative writing facilitator based in Dublin. Her next novel, Nothing Tastes As Good will be published by Hot Key Books in July