Neil Gaiman has won the John Newbery Medal for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book. (Philippe Matas/HarperCollins/Associated Press)

Neil Gaiman, the modern master of the horror-fantasy genre, has receive one of the U.S. most prestigious prizes for children's literature: the John Newbery Medal.

Winning young adult novel The Graveyard Book is Gaiman's homage to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. It follows the fortunes of a young hero, Bod, who escapes the murder of his family and is protected and raised by the inhabitants of a graveyard.

In The Jungle Book, a boy is raised by animals, but in Gaiman's work his parent figures include a vampire, a werewolf and a witch.

Gaiman is the bestselling author of adult novels such as American Gods and Anansi Boys and contributed to the films Beowulf and Coraline.

The John Newbery Medal is awarded annually by the American Library Association along with several other awards for children's literature. Winners were announced Monday in Denver.

Beth Krommes won the 2009 Randolph Caldecott Medal for illustration for her work on The House in the Night, written by Susan Marie Swanson.

Kadir Nelson, whose debut non-fiction book tells the story of how gifted athletes overcame racial discrimination in the early part of the 20th century, won two awards for We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball.

He won the Coretta Scott King award for best African-American author and the Robert F. Sibert Award for the most distinguished informational book. Nelson also received special mention for his illustrations

The Coretta Scott King award for illustration was given to Floyd Cooper for The Blacker the Berry by Joyce Carol Thomas. The book also received special mention for its writing, which celebrates the many shades of black skin.

The Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for beginning reader books went to Are You Ready to Play Outside? by Mo Willems.

Four young adult books won Newbery Honors:

• The Underneath by Kathi Appelt.
• The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom by Margarita Engle.
• Savvy by Ingrid Law.
• After Tupac & D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson.