The Siobhan Dowd Trust

Siobhan Dowd's career as a children's author began in 2004 when she contributed a story about an Irish traveller, 'The Pavee and the Buffer', to a collection of short stories about racism, Skin Deep (Puffin, 2004).

Despite ill health (she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004), Dowd went on to write four full-length novels before her untimely death in 2007. They are published by David Fickling Books, an imprint of Random House. Dowd bequeathed the future royalties from the sale of her books to the Siobhan Dowd Trust.

A Swift Pure Cry (2006)

Ireland, 1984.

After Shell's mother dies, her obsessively religious father descends into alcoholic mourning and Shell is left to care for her younger brother and sister. Her only release from the harshness of everyday life comes from her budding spiritual friendship with a naive young priest, and most importantly, her developing relationship with her school friend Declan.

But when Declan suddenly leaves Ireland to seek his fortune in America, Shell finds herself pregnant and at the centre of a scandal that rocks the small community in which she lives, with repercussions across the whole country. The lives of those immediately around her will never be the same again.

Awards

2007 Branford Boase Award – winner
2007 Bisto Book Awards – Eilis Dillon Award – winner
2007 CBI Bisto Book of the Year – shortlisted
2007 Carnegie Medal – shortlisted
2007 Waterstone's Children's Book Prize – shortlisted
2006 Guardian Fiction Children's Award – shortlisted
2006 Booktrust Teenage Prize – shortlisted

The London Eye Mystery (2007)

Monday, 24 May, 11.32 a.m. Ted and Kat watch their cousin Salim get on board the London Eye. He turns and waves and the pod rises from the ground.

Monday, 24 May, 12.02 p.m. The pod lands and the doors open. People exit in all shapes and sizes – but where is Salim?

Ted and his older sister, Kat, become sleuthing partners, since the police are having no luck. Despite their prickly relationship, they overcome their differences to follow a trail of clues across London in a desperate bid to find their cousin. And ultimately it comes down to Ted, whose brain runs on its own unique operating system, to find the key to the mystery.

Awards

2007 NASEN/TES Special Educational Needs Children's Book Award – winner
2008 Southwark Schools Book Award – winner
2008 CBI Bisto Book of the Year – winner
2008 Carnegie Medal – longlisted
2008 Red House Children's Book Award – shortlisted
2008 Sheffield Children's Book Award – shortlisted
2008 Doncaster Book Award – shortlisted

Bog Child (2008)

Digging for peat in the mountain with his Uncle Tally, Fergus finds the body of a child, and it looks as if she's been murdered. As Fergus tries to make sense of the mad world around him – his brother on hunger-strike in prison, his growing feelings for Cora, his parents arguing over the Troubles, and him in it up to the neck, blackmailed into smuggling mysterious packages across the border – a little voice comes to him in his dreams, and the mystery of the bog child unfurls.

Awards

2008 Guardian Fiction Children's Award – longlisted

Solace of the Road (due 2009)

Memories of Mum are the only thing that make Holly Hogan happy. She hates her foster family with their too-nice ways and their false sympathy. And she hates her life, her stupid school and the way everyone is always on at her. Then she finds the wig, and everything changes. Wearing the long, flowing blonde locks she feels transformed.