He was given an Arts Council Writers' Award to work on Kit's Wilderness (1999), a teenage novel inspired by the author's childhood memories of disused mines. In 2007, it was shortlisted for the Carnegie of Carnegies.

The book won both the Carnegie Medal (1998) and the Whitbread Children's Book Award (1998). His first children's novel, Skellig, the story of a strange, part-human 'creature' who transforms the lives of two young children forever, was published to immediate acclaim in 1998. His first book, Sleepless Nights, a collection of short stories for adults, was published in 1985 and was followed in 1997 by a second volume, A Kind of Heaven. He is an experienced creative writing teacher and has worked for the Arvon Foundation and for schools, colleges and universities, and is in demand as a speaker at festivals and conferences around the world. He then returned to Newcastle, where he worked as a part-time Special Needs teacher and edited the literary fiction journal Panurge.

After graduating, he worked as a teacher for five years before moving to a remote artists' commune in Norfolk to concentrate on his writing. He was educated at the University of East Anglia and Newcastle Polytechnic. David Almond was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1951 and grew up in the small mining town of Felling.

Novel skellig by david almond