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"It
hasn't changed me at all!" - Mark Haddon is not phased by his
£25,000 prize money as the winner of the Whitbread Book of
the Year Award.
"It
means I can buy a few more CDs without feeling guilty and I can
buy novels in hard back."
'The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night' tells the story of 15-year-old
Christopher who has autism.
"He
loves order," said Mark, "he loves patterns; he likes
to keep his life very safe. What he finds difficult is understanding
other people so he can't really understand emotions; he can't understand
people's faces.
"The
book is a journey. Basically his life is turned completely upside
down as a result of this investigation into the death of a dog which
he starts to carry out."
Comedy
Mark
is not new to awards, having won two BAFTAs for Microsoap, a children's
comedy drama which he write for the BBC and Disney.
The
Northampton-born author now lives in Oxfordshire but he still returns
to the county to visit his parents: "All my childhood memories
are set in Northampton" he said.
And
the story of the famous ghost that haunts the Grosvenor Shopping
Centre is retold in the award-winning novel.
Haunted
"I
well remember when I was a youngster hanging out in the coffee shop
in the Grosvenor Shopping Centre. There were stories about it being
haunted because it was built on the site of an old Greyfriars monastery.
"Several
years before the shopping centre was built, my father, who was a
local architect, visited a shoe shop on the same site. He went into
the basement and saw a figure in grey moving across the room. He
went round the corner to talk to this person, who he assumed was
a shopping assistant, and there was no one down there. He has actually
seen one of the ghosts of Greyfriars Shopping Centre."
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