Kevin M. Brooks is an English writer best known for young-adult novels. The Bunker Diary, published by Penguin Books in 2013, won the annual Carnegie Medal as the best new book for children or young adults published in the U.K., an exceptionally controversial selection by the British librarians. Early life and education Brooks was born in Pinhoe on the outskirts of Exeter in south-west England, the second of three brothers. At the age of 11, he won a scholarship to Exeter School, where he felt estranged from the other pupils from better-off families and took solace in fiction. He went on to study psychology and philosophy at Aston University in Birmingham. His father died when he was 20. Brooks's debut novel Martyn Pig was published in 2002 by Chicken House, where it was edited by the founder of the company Barry Cunningham, OBE. They won the next Branford Boase Award "for authors and their editors", which annually recognises an outstanding British novel for young people by a first-time novelist. By a wide margin his work most widely held in WorldCat libraries is the 2009 novel Killing God, entitled Dawn in North America. 

March 30th, 1959 in Pinhoe (Age 65)