For a 65-year-old, there is something almost adolescent about novelist Aidan Chambers; youthful enthusiasm for self-discovery is shot through with a rebellious streak. "I find getting old fascinating," says the former teacher and monk without a hint of cynicism.
His outlook is perhaps not so surprising: he quit teaching and the monastic life in the late sixties and has spent his days since seeing the world through the eyes of youngsters on the brink of adulthood.
His latest novel - Postcards From No Man's Land - has just earned him the coveted Carnegie Medal, awarded by the Library Association's Youth Libraries Group. The judges described it as "exceptional - the kind of book that gives you hope for the future of literature for children and young people".
But the award has come as a surprise to Chambers. "I just don't win things and for the last 10 years or so I have not been aware of much attention being given me here."
Mention books for teenagers and most people will think of Harry Potter - also a contender for this year's Carnegie - and Adrian Mole. But Chambers' novels are gritty, complex and deal with contentious issues. Adult novels, in other words, but written from the point of view of a young person. "It has certain literary and artistic benefits," says Chambers, who also has a loyal adult following.
"When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings. As far as content goes - the stuff that bothers the puritans - my rule is, anything that the young protagonist could actually experience or witness happening in real life can go into the book."
Postcards touches on euthanasia, war, adultery, art and sexual identity as viewed by a 17-year-old visiting Amsterdam for the first time, and an old lady looking back on her awakening to love during the Battle of Arnhem and its tragic aftermath.
Interestingly, Chambers, who has no children, has many more readers in mainland Europe, particularly Holland and Sweden, than he does on his home turf. Invitations from schools there to discuss his work with teenage fans keep him away from home for three months a year.
Chambers believes this is because British 16- to 19-year-olds read very little outside the curriculum. A-level English has too few set texts, he says, with pupils not being encouraged to dip into a wide variety of literature as they are on the Continent.
But his main complaint about English teaching is reserved for the current government and the previous two Tory administrations, which he blames for turning reading into a mechanical, joyless experience.
"Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it," says Chambers. "And yet the government thinks it can do it by numbers. They are turning teachers into machines and producing factory fodder as a result. He believes the real key to improving the nation's reading habits would be to make all trainee English teachers devote three years to having a working knowledge of at least 500 books.
"You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it. Any kid here who becomes literary now does so in spite of the system and not because of it."
His own educational experience is testimony to the lasting influence of an inspirational teacher. Chambers, an only child, comes from County Durham. All the male members of his family were miners apart from his father, who was a joiner. He failed the 11-plus, but was picked out as a late developer and sent to Darlington Grammar School.
His English teacher, Jim Osborn, introduced him to books and the theatre and by 15, Chambers had secretly decided he wanted to be a writer. He credits Osborn with moving pupils on to different and more challenging texts, never letting them settle in to one style of literature. "His English lessons were magic. I can still remember lots of them."
Osborn encouraged him to become a teacher and despatched him to Borough Road College in Isleworth, Middlesex.
During his first teaching job at West Cliff High School for boys in Southend, Chambers became an Anglican and joined the Community of Glorious Ascension in Stroud.
He almost fell into writing for the teenage market by accident. "There were 6,000 volumes in that library and yet the kids were telling me there was nothing to read."
By 1966, Chambers had had his first play, Johnny Salter, published and a book called The Reluctant Reader, based on research carried out with his pupils.
By 1968 he had left teaching and the monastery behind him, met his future wife, Nancy Lockwood, and together they founded The Thimble Press and published Signal, a critical journal devoted to children's books.
But it was not until 1975 that he found his true voice as a novelist with the first of his serious teenage novels, Breaktime. By the time the second - Dance on my Grave - was published he knew there would be six in the "family". "The books are all looking at the same material - love, sexuality and so on - but each book sees it in a different way."
He believes it is crucial that youngsters "find" themselves in books. "Teenagers are better informed today, but may be none the wiser. You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.
"The power of the peer group is much greater than it used to be, and there is such a commercial nature about what you wear, what you listen to, that a literature that speaks about the hidden inner person is more important than it has ever been."
He is currently researching the sixth book, whose main character will be a woman. And after that? "I'll write my old man books."