Author was hit by “heartbreaking rejection” before she won prestigious honour

AN AUTHOR who suffered years of “heartbreaking rejection” before being published has won the UK’s most prestigious children’s book award – and credited years of working with a “bunch of unsavoury rock bands” for her success.

Ruta Sepetys, 49, has been awarded the 2017 CILIP Carnegie Medal for her refugee story,

Salt To The Sea, a fictionalised account of the worst maritime disaster in history.

The book has recently been picked up for development by Universal Pictures, with a “dream team” writer and producer adapting it for the big screen.

Sepetys said that the 20 years she spent in the music industry as an artist manager, working with “a bunch of unsavoury rock bands, a video game composer, and a film composer” helped her find her writing voice.

“I spent many years helping artists and musicians tell stories through song and it really taught me the power of melody and rhythm,” she told the Press Association.

“That was such good training for me, to understand the importance of melody and rhythm as a novelist now... rhythm and melody are so powerful.”

The CILIP Carnegie marks outstanding writing for children and young people and is the oldest children’ s book award in the UK.

But the US author told how she had years of rejection before she found success.

“I had a very, very rocky path to publication. Part of that was about finding my own authentic voice... I received so many rejections,” she said. Her first novel,

which followed the story of a 15-year-old arrested by the Soviet secret police and deported to Siberia, became a best-seller after it was published in 2011.