Patrick Ness wins Carnegie medal for second year running

Author Patrick Ness, who yesterday won British children's books' highest literary honour the Carnegie medal for the second year running, used his acceptance speech to attack what he sees as the government's negative attitude towards teenagers.

Ness, whose winning novel A Monster Calls is the story of Conor, a 13-year-old who is visited by the creature of his nightmares as his mother dies of cancer, criticised education minister Michael Gove as a "man with no classroom teaching experience" who views teenagers as "laboratory animals to be experimented upon".

"The worst thing our current government and, in fact, we as a culture do about teenagers is that we only seem to discuss them in negative terms. What they can't do, what they aren't achieving. Why have we allowed that to happen?" said Ness.

He particularly criticised Gove's "demonisation" of "hard-working, dedicated teachers for no other reason, it seems, than because they disagree with his policies, which include – incredibly – the idea that private companies making a profit on tax-funded schools might be an OK thing".

He dedicated his award to his young readers: "The ones who are a walking, talking rebuttal to every negative thing that gets said about them, the ones who stick two fingers up to us and thrive anyway."

The Carnegie medal, which is chosen by librarians, has been running since 1937. Its winners are a roll call of the great and the good in British children's literature, from Arthur Ransome to Elizabeth Goudge and Penelope Lively. Ness took the medal last year for the final volume in his young adult fantasy trilogy, Monsters of Men, and today became only the second author ever to win the Carnegie in consecutive years, after Peter Dickinson won in 1979 and 1980. A Monster Calls also made history by taking the prestigious illustrators' award the Kate Greenaway medal, for Jim Kay's illustrations of Ness's story, making it the first book ever to win both prizes.

"It was mind-blowing to find a book that so perfectly captured the spirit of both awards," said Sutton librarian Rachel Levy, chair of the judging panel of 12 librarians. "A Monster Calls is outstanding in every way: Patrick Ness's story is exquisitely told with not a word out of place. Jim Kay's bold, haunting illustrations beautifully complement, and even expand the text. This is a book readers will remember and return to over and over again. It is, quite simply, one of the defining books of its generation."

Kay said that winning the Greenaway for only the second children's book he has worked on was "amazing, and it hasn't properly registered yet". He fell in love with A Monster Calls when he read it, but found it "terrifying" when he began work on the novel. "It was very experimental. I had no idea how it would look visually. I collected objects, anything I could print from which would make an interesting mark. I was so nervous that I'd lost confidence in my own drawing, so I was adapting other images rather than sitting and drawing myself," he said. "As I would work I would think 'that looks like a row of trees', and I would shuffle and tinker until images started to emerge. The problem was the attrition rate was phenomenal – so many didn't work. We used about 20% of what I did."

Ness told the Guardian that his reaction on winning was "genuine disbelief". "I thought I'd no chance again, but I was really hoping that Jim would win the Greenaway because his work is so amazing," said the author. When he found out A Monster Calls had taken both prizes, it was "the best result I could have possibly wanted for the book, because it means that people have reason to keep talking about Siobhan Dowd and to keep reading her books".

A Monster Calls was written by Ness from a set of notes left behind by the Carnegie-medal winning Dowd before she died of cancer in 2007, aged 47. "I felt like I'd been handed a baton and told to run with it," said Ness. "It was a small start, not much, but what was there was potent, and suggested to me where I would take the story."

With Ness setting his Chaos Walking trilogy on a planet far from earth, at first glance the two authors appear very different. But Ness believes there are deep-reaching similarities between their writing. "At a cursory glance I may not have been the most obvious choice," he said. "But I start from a position of wanting to tell the truth. When I was a teenager I felt I never got the truth. We need to take the complexity and emotions of a teenager seriously. That is the starting premise of Chaos Walking, and of how Siobhan wrote. Our books have different settings, but I hope we have in common that we try to inhabit teenagers."

Ness said that during his own teenage years, he was "the gay, preppy, deeply anxious son of American fundamentalist Christians", and that he "couldn't have felt more different than if I'd had a tail".

"When I write for teenagers, I'm really writing for the teenage me," he said. "My books for teenagers have all ended up being about being heard. About being taken seriously. About being treated as a complex creation who doesn't always get things right but – importantly – also doesn't always get things wrong."

And teenagers today, he said, are still "the same interesting, sensitive, smart, funny, questioning people they've always been".