Skulduggery Pleasant Award

26/07/2010 -

Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant tops the web-poll for Book of the Decade.

The ‘Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards’ announced the winner of their Irish Book of the Decade competition. With almost 5,000 online votes cast over the last month, ‘comic fantasy’ novel Skulduggery Pleasant by Dubliner Derek Landy, has topped the web-poll to decide the nation’s favourite Irish Book of the Decade.

Derek Landy has truly taken the literary world by storm since his debut novel was published in 2007 and since then he has published three further books in the series and has just completed his fifth, titled ‘Mortal Coil’, which is due to be published in September 2010.

Derek’s books have not only garnered a massive international following amongst teenagers and those that are young at heart, but they have also received international acclaim with Skulduggery Pleasant winning the Red House Children’s Book Award, and the second in the series, Playing With Fire, winning the Dublin Airport Authority Irish Children’s Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards in 2008.

Skulduggery Pleasant tells the story of Stephanie, a feisty twelve-year-old girl, and a wise-cracking magician turned detective who is, among other things, dead! Stephanie's uncle Gordon is a writer of horror fiction. But when he dies and leaves her his estate, Stephanie learns that while he may have written horror, it certainly wasn't fiction. Pursued by evil forces intent on recovering a mysterious key, Stephanie finds help from an unusual source….the wisecracking skeleton of a dead wizard.

This competition was devised by the ‘Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards’ to celebrate and recognise the great diversity of all Irish authors and to discover the nation’s favourite book of the Noughties, a decade in which Irish writers have enjoyed major successes both at home and abroad. The shortlist of 50 Irish books included internationally renowned Irish authors such as Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, Cathy Kelly, Anne Enright, Cecelia Ahern and Colm Tobin as well as national treasures Bill Cullen, Roy Keane, Eamon Dunphy and Ross O’Carroll Kelly.