He's courted controversy for more than a decade with his bestselling tales of underage sex and teenage heroin addicts, but Melvin Burgess has finally found a story too controversial for his publishers to handle: his own.

The Carnegie medal-winning author, whose new novel, Nicholas Dane, tackles the subject of sexual abuse in children's homes, has found a recently-completed teenage memoir dropped by his publisher over fears that it could provoke costly legal action.

"I'm always getting asked 'is this you in this book?'" said Burgess, "so I thought I'd say what I'd done. It was also a good way of looking at what it's like being a teenager. I did it, it was finished, and my publisher at Andersen Press was happy with it. Memoirs don't sell as well as fiction, but it was all sorted, but then they had it read for libel."

It turned out that the book fell foul of the privacy clause of the European convention on human rights, and there were concerns that it could provoke a host of challenges from people written about in the book. "It's about what I got up to and thought about when I was a teenager – friends of mine I smoked joints with ... some of those games of 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine', gropes in the broom cupboard," Burgess said. But "some of those boys you might have had a joint with, or ripped a car aerial off with, might be members of the Conservative party, and the girls might be respectable grannies", neither of whom would be likely to welcome having their teenage years exposed by an author.

He was given various options: to get in touch with everyone mentioned in the book to ask for their permission, to fictionalise it or to disguise everyone in the book so they couldn't possibly be identified. After rejecting the first two options, Burgess had reworked the manuscript, changing "locations, names, hair colour, year, possibly even gender", only to discover, to his dismay, that his publisher had decided not to go ahead.

Burgess is now looking to place the memoir elsewhere, but believes the whole genre of biography is being affected by the invasion of privacy clause, which states that "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".

"There's so much more deception in autobiography and memoirs than there used to be," he said. "It's a big issue in publishing [and] could be the end of this whole genre."

His publisher at Andersen Press, Klaus Flugge, said that after 20 years of working on Burgess's fiction he was disappointed not to have been able to publish the memoir, adding that the author was "quite upset".

"He still feels I got scared," Flugge continued, "and a larger multinational corporation would not hesitate to publish this book."

But after considering his lawyers' advice, he decided it was impossible to go ahead with publishing the memoir.

"The invasion of privacy clause makes it harder to publish memoirs," Flugge added, "and it's having a significant effect on publishers."