Jenny Valentine, 37, last night won the 40th Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. The £1,500 prize was awarded last night at an event attended by many of the young critics of the prize.

FINDING VIOLET PARK is the story of a "friendship" forged beyond the grave between a teenage boy and the elderly woman whose ashes he discovers abandoned in a taxi office.

Julia Eccleshare, the chair of the judging panel, said of FINDING VIOLET PARK:
"It was the clarity of style and the freshness of Valentine's hero Lucas that impressed the Guardian judges. By the blockbusting standards of today's fiction it is a short novel, but the economy of her writing is very powerful."

The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize is the only children's book award judged by children's authors themselves.

FINDING VIOLET PARK has also been selected for the Richard and Judy Best Kids Books Ever programme, to be screened on October 28.