The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness won the £1,500 (US$2,766) Guardian children's fiction prize, beating Jenny Downham's Before I Die, Frank Cottrell Boyce's Cosmic and Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child.

"I think it was a super-strong shortlist," said a "genuinely astonished" Ness of his first novel, published here by Candlewick, about a world where thoughts are audible. "Before I Die is a huge hit, Frank is a great writer, and I'm reading Siobhan Dowd now. It's really great and I kind of thought she would win."

According to the Guardian, Ness, a literary critic at the paper, "turned to children's fiction after he had the idea of a world where information overload is inescapable, and knew it was a book for teenagers."

"The thing a teenage audience will do for you is that if you don't insult their intelligence, they will often follow you to strange places, so you can really really go for it," he said. "This story felt like something that's got to be really gone for, really shouted out from the rafters, and teenage fiction is where you can do that and still not be shoved into genre."