Little bookworms have never had it so good. Award-winning writers for children are a prolific lot, and the next Jacqueline Wilson is awaited with as much bated breath as an Ian McEwan or a Beryl Bainbridge. Philip Pullman, who is based in Oxford, and Beverley Naidoo, who lives in Britain but was born in South Africa, are two sought-after writers whose popularity on the talk circuit makes them hard to catch up with.

Their busyness, together with the fact that they have both won the Carnegie Medal for young people's literature, are about the only things they have in common. Naidoo clearly writes for children, while Pullman refuses the label of children's writer. He prefers to say that his audience includes children, and he's right. Parents queue up to read his books when their offspring have relinquished them, and some of his stories are now published in adult editions, to avoid grown-ups the embarrassment of reading children's books in public.

A genial man, Pullman arrives for our interview looking like the teacher he once was, dressed in baggy trousers, trainers and a woolly sleeveless cardigan, with a bulging bag over his shoulder. He has just finished a gruelling tour - in a chauffeur-driven limousine, mind you - and in two weeks he's off to give some lectures in the United States. He's frightened of going, he says, but feels it would be cowardly to stay at home.

Interestingly, Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, whose final instalment, The Amber Spyglass, was longlisted for this year's Booker Prize, is full of death and destruction. "But it's mostly hand-to-hand combat," he points out, clearly appalled by the events of September 11th. Hand to hand or not, The Amber Spyglass is exhausting reading, as its pre-teen heroes, Will and Lyra, hurtle from crisis to catastrophe, with many a near-death experience in between, finding love and hope in the end. It is the perfect adventure story, but that's what Pullman is, of course: a storyteller and spinner of yarns.

His books have been categorised as fantasy, but Pullman says that's wrong: they're stark realism. It depends whether you're talking about the inner or the outer journey, of course. Lyra comes from a world in which children have daemons - supernatural beings as opposed to demons, or evil spirits - that embody their owners' emotions, protecting and guiding them through the tempests, trials and turbulence that characterise the life of a 13-year-old.

As a schoolteacher in Oxford, Pullman used to narrate - not read - The Iliad and The Odyssey once a week to his class of 13-year-olds, every week of every term for 12 years. "That's something you couldn't do now," he says. "There's simply no room for that sort of thing in the National Curriculum. All the good teachers have got out - or are suicidal."

Last year, when Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side Of Truth won the Carnegie Medal (Pullman's Northern Lights won in 1995), she made the same point in her acceptance speech. Literature, she said, is a bridge to other worlds, and Britain's current functionalist approach to teaching literacy is insidious and damaging.

Whereas Pullman's children fight their way through lunar landscapes and over sky-scraping mountain tops, Naidoo's have feet set firmly in the jungle of a London housing estate.

In The Other Side Of Truth, her two children are middle-class Nigerian refugees whose father is a journalist critical of the regime of Sani Abacha.

When he attracts the attention of political thugs who murder his wife, he decides the children must go to London - where they experience ignorance and racism and learn that lying may be a tool of survival. It is a story based on the execution in 1995 of Ken Saro Wiwa, the human-rights activist who campaigned for the Ogoni people of southern Nigeria.

A political activist who endured prison and solitary confinement under apartheid, Naidoo escaped to London at the age of 21 and spent her exile writing about black children in South Africa. "Then Ken Saro Wiwa was executed and I decided, enough of Africa. I would write about racism here in England."

Her novels are clear and to the point, telling stories of the young victims of apartheid and racism. She is much in demand at schools, where, she says, even if there is no cultural diversity, everyone has learned about the issues from television.

Brought up in a white household - her mother was Jewish, her school Catholic and her Sunday school Anglican - Naidoo did not question the inequalities of apartheid South Africa until she went to university.

But once she started writing in England, she found herself concentrating on black children - traumatised children, street children, brave children. It was an indication that she was on the right track when her work was banned in South Africa (it was unbanned in 1991).

"The question for me was always, how can I convey such brutal abuse of power without losing my young readers' hope and beliefs that there can be other ways in which human beings relate to each other?" she says.

It is a theme that runs through Pullman's books, too, although his claim that he is a stark realist must be seen in the context of his educational background. He cheerfully confesses to being a plagiarist, taking ideas, phrases and descriptions from everywhere. "If I had a daemon, it would be a magpie," he says.

His inspiration is high culture - Milton, Blake, Coleridge, the Bible - and he starts each chapter with an extended quote. His greatest debt is to Milton's Paradise Lost - though, giving it his own spin, he lays bare the stultifying restrictions of organised Christianity.

One of his accolades, not unlike Naidoo's banning, was a review in the Catholic Herald that castigated The Amber Spyglass as a thousand times more dangerous than J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, urging that it be burned. Pullman's eyes sparkle with glee as he describes the article. In fact, following the untimely death of his father, he was reared by his grandfather, a benign Church of England rector in Norfolk, who passed on to him a very useful knowledge of the Old Testament.

Writing doesn't give him any pleasure, he says, and it was no fun writing the trilogy. Not even when he was having a go at the church and other pillars of the Establishment? "No, it's just how I earn my living."

The only thing he gets from writing at the end of each day is the satisfaction of knowing he has produced his regulation three pages. "I'm a grumpy old bugger," he says, staring into the dregs of his lukewarm coffee.

This will be news to the 12-year-old in my family whose verdict on Pullman's page-turning books is that "they're tubular". Even Milton couldn't top that.

The Amber Spyglass is published by Scholastic, £6.99 in UK. The Other Side Of Truth is published by Puffin Books, £4.99 in UK

Beverley Naidoo will be speaking at libraries and schools around Dublin as part of the African Cultural Institute's African Junior Literature Festival, which started yesterday (more details from 01-8780613)

Today is the start of the Children's Book Festival, which runs until the end of the month, with events at libraries around the Republic (more details from 01-2842036, or e-mail rdawson@eircom.net; there will be a two-page special on children's books in Weekend on Saturday