Death and the Carnegie Medal
Death has always been a presence in Carnegie Medal winning books. The third winner, Noel Streatfeild's The Circus is Coming begins like this: "Peter and Sarah were orphans. When they were babies their father and mother were killed in a railway accident, so they came to live with their aunt." This is an extreme example of how children's authors get rid of the parents to allow the children some agency. Roald Dahl did a very similar thing in James and the Giant Peach although he waited until the second paragraph to dispatch James's parents by means of an angry rhinoceros. Both Streatfeild and Dahl are just clearing the ground before they start their stories, cutting the protagonists free from those pesky parents. Books like The Lantern Bearers and Tulku do the same thing in a more organic way, but although people die in both these books, death is not central to the stories. There are other winners with high body-counts, like Ronald Welch's Knight Crusa