"I get goosebumps just thinking about it," says Gregory Hughes. "Patrick Ness won it in 2008, Neil Gaiman won in 2009 and for my name to be put alongside their names, to win the same award they've won … I'm absolutely blown away by it."
Speaking down the phone from his current home in Vancouver, Hughes sounds genuinely dazed by the news that his first novel, Unhooking the Moon, has won the Booktrust teenage fiction prize. The enthusiastic reception this extraordinary debut has received left him sounding much the same when we met in London after he was shortlisted for the Guardian children's fiction prize.
It features one of the most original and sparkling characters children's fiction has seen in a long time: the Rat, a precocious 10-year-old girl who will square up to anyone, suffers strange fits and visions, and is always on the lookout for "goddamn paedophiles". Endearing and exasperating in equal measure, she is the driving force behind the road trip from Winnipeg to New York she and her long-suffering older brother Bob take to find their long-lost "drug dealer" uncle. Along the way the newly orphaned siblings encounter hustlers, conmen, a world famous rapper and, eventually, nothing less than a goddamn paedophile. Gritty and humorous yet still somehow magical, Unhooking the Moon is one of those debuts that appears to have sprung out of the blue, with no obvious precedents. So where did it emerge from and who is Gregory Hughes?
The shaven-headed author, who despite his youthful looks says he's almost fifty, comes with a back story to match some of his own characters'. He wrote the book while he was in Iceland, living for eight months in a room so small he could touch both walls with his arms out ("and I haven't even got long arms!") eating in Iceland's "one and only cheap supermarket" and using the swimming pool across the road for showers, but he also drew on some of his own experiences in the US, including a spell sleeping rough in Central Park. The starting point, however, was a chance remark about Canada's prairielands.
"I used to be a bicycle courier in Toronto and I had a girlfriend from Winnipeg so I asked her what it was like there. She said 'it's a land so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days'. I flew into Winnipeg to see for myself and that's exactly what it's like. I wanted to base a story there," he explains, his native Liverpudlian twang untroubled by his years of travel and living abroad.
Wanting to write a book with "a girl and a boy that come from some nowhere place to New York and it becomes a big media event", he found the Rat's character in a combination of "my brother's kid, Julie" who was teased for looking like a rat when she was a child, with her mousy brown hair and pointy ears, and Hughes's godson Russell who was "really mouthy as a kid" and, at the age of about eight, had all the children on a rough estate in Liverpool terrified of paedophiles.
However, the Rat's voice is all Hughes's own and it came naturally to him, he says. "I thought it would be a great thing to write a book that anyone could read. I never toned down the language, I wrote it on my voice, in just the way I speak. I was taught that you should never try to make the language flowery or show off to impress the reader and I talk kind of basic anyway, I don't use big words so the language I was using, an 11 or 12-year-old would not have to strain themselves to understand it."
Hughes was also determined that the book would not have a straightforwardly happy ending. "All the reviews I read of kids' books had happy endings. But by the age of 11 or 12 kids know that life is not a bunch of roses and for a lot of children in the world there are no happy endings," he says.
There were times when Hughes's own life probably didn't look like it was going to have much of a happy ending. Growing up in a large family around Liverpool docks, he got into trouble at school and then with the police – "stealing cars and shoplifting and all that business" – and ended up in a home for wayward boys at the age of 14. He loved it. It was run by "characters", from a headmaster who dressed like a gangster to a "very upper-class housemaster who had been an officer in the army and taken shrapnel on the beaches of Italy and used to roam around the home shouting orders as if the war was still on".
There was another brief spell of "trouble" of the stealing cars variety after Hughes left the home at 17. He ended up back in a detention centre but within a few years he'd kicked the drinking, started running marathons, discovered travel and took himself off to get some education. There followed GCSEs (including English with a teacher who spotted he had an "innate talent" after reading a piece he wrote about his experience spending the night on a park bench in Times Square while trying to get back to Liverpool from the States for his father's funeral), A levels and an HND in computer science, which he "hated from the day it started to the day it finished". Disillusioned, and "never a big fan of Liverpool" he set out to get as far away from it as possible, and has been roaming the world for the 25 or so years since then.
Commercial diving in Canada and Norway, flipping burgers at the Statue of Liberty, working the Circle Line ferries around Manhattan, an underwater cleaner on fish farms … Hughes ticks off his various occupations and describes the job he's just left in Norway: "I'm a kitchen assistant now and it's great. I eat in the kitchen and so when I go home I don't need to eat, so you never really spend money on food, and last time I was there I was living in a tent so I never really paid money for rent either …"
And now he can add prize-winning novelist to the list. It's been a long time coming: Hughes has been writing on and off for about 10 years since taking some creative writing classes at the Marymount Manhattan College (which he features at the end of Unhooking the Moon), while working as a furniture removal man in New York. But the turning point came, ironically, back in his much-maligned Liverpool where a "tough and exceptional" writing teacher at the college of continuing education had no qualms about ripping up any writing he thought was rubbish and sending Hughes away to write it again.
"He taught me to tell a story the way you would tell a story to the person sitting opposite you," Hughes explains, a piece of advice which helped him to unlock the voice which drives Unhooking the Moon. "If that book is in any way good it is because of that one thing."