TYWYN author, Manon Steffan Ros has picked up this year’s prestigious Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing for her novel, The Blue Book of Nebo.

The novel four young adults impressed the judges, and publisher, Firefly Press is delighted.

Congratulating Manon on her historic achievement, publisher Penny Thomas said: “This is a beautiful and powerful novel.

“A deceptively simple story of a dystopian future, it gives the reader pause for thought, infused with warmth, gentleness, and new ways to look at our world and the ways we live in it.

“It’s truly wonderful that a novel adapted from Welsh by the author, is the first book in translation to win the award. I hope there will be many more.

“We’d like to thank the Carnegie judges, and all the nominating CILP members for championing this slim volume from an indie publisher based in Wales. They do such an excellent and important job for young readers, and for children’s and YA literature. We’d also like to thank the Books Council of Wales for its support for this title and for literature from Wales in both languages, without which Firefly would not have been able to publish this book.

“Most of all we’d like to congratulate Manon on her lyrical and deeply moving novel, which we feel is destined to become a modern classic and thank her for choosing Firefly to publish this English adaptation of Llyfr Glas Nebo. We are so happy to be a part of this journey.”

The Blue Book of Nebo was also a prize-winner in three categories of the 2019 Wales Book of the Year Award and Winner of the 2018 National Eisteddfod Prose Medal when originally published by Y Lolfa as Llyfr Glas Nebo.

The Blue Book of Nebo is a spellbinding and minutely observed story of Dylan and his mother who survive the year ‘The End’ comes.

Isolated in their lonely hillside home near Nebo in north Wales, with no idea what has happened to the world they knew before it was destroyed in a devastating attack, mother and son begin to confide their experiences, memories and secrets in a notebook – the Blue Book of Nebo.

What unfolds is a compelling and intimate account of what is left behind when everyday 21st century life vanishes; and a changing relationship as Dylan grows up in a world like no other, where he must protect his small family, and still keep his own secrets.

Manon has won the prestigious Tir na n’Og Award for Welsh Children’s Literature four times, with novels Trwy’r Tonnau (2010), Prism (2012), Pluen (2017) and most recently Fi a Joe Allen (2019).