Mal Peet, Philip Reeve and Meg Rosoff head a shortlist for the 2007 Booktrust teenage fiction award, announced earlier today, which demonstrates the strength of contemporary youth fiction. They are joined on the shortlist for the £2,500 prize by Theresa Breslin, Kate Cann and Marcus Sedgwick.
The chair of judges, librarian Angela Wilkinson, saluted the "wide range of excellent contemporary teenage fiction available today".
"Any one of these well-crafted novels would be a worthy winner," she said, "showing storytelling at its finest with characters and places that linger in the mind long after the final page has been turned."
The shortlisted books range from an irreverent reworking of Arthurian myth to a Bildungsroman set in Luton.
Philip Reeve, who won last year's Guardian children's fiction prize with A Darkling Plain, is nominated for Here Lies Arthur, a brutal Dark Ages tale which re-imagines Arthur as a bullying tyrant, Guinevere as a pale, old woman, and Merlin as the true magician of the piece - the wily bard who can transmute all this mud and gore into the stuff of legend.
Another Guardian children's fiction prize winner, Meg Rosoff, is nominated for her second novel, Just in Case. Here she wrestles with questions of fate and survival as she follows a boy in flight from an early brush with death. The Carnegie medal-winner Mal Peet makes the list with The Penalty, a football story which investigates the legacy of slavery in the corruption of modern Brazil.
The rest of the list is made up of Theresa Breslin's Renaissance thriller, The Medici Seal, Kate Cann's dose of teen gothic, Leaving Poppy, and Marcus Sedgwick's return to the bloody roots of vampire myths, My Swordhand is Singing.
The new director of the reading charity Booktrust, Viv Bird, said she was "thrilled" by this year's entry.
"These books are guaranteed to inspire and grip the imagination of any reader," she said.
Last year's winner, Anthony McGowan, will join Angela Wilkinson on the judging panel alongside the journalist Tom Gatti and the school student Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft.
The winner of the 2007 award will be announced at a London ceremony on October 31.
