Laurie Halse Anderson has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, becoming the first American author to take home the prize for children’s literature since 2018, Publishers Weekly reports.
Anderson is widely regarded as one of the best children’s and young adult authors in the country. In 2009, she won the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors lifetime achievement in writing for young readers. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for young people’s literature two times, for her novels Speak and Chains.
Speak, published in 1999, has been a frequent target of censors, who have challenged the book because it deals with a young rape survivor. The American Library Association listed it as the fourth most challenged or banned book of 2020.
In a citation for the Lindgren Award, the prize’s jury wrote that the author “gives voice to the search for meaning, identity, and truth, both in the present and the past. Her darkly radiant realism reveals the vital role of time and memory in young people’s lives. Pain and anxiety, yearning and love, class and sex are investigated with stylistic precision and dispassionate wit. With tender intensity, Laurie Halse Anderson evokes moods and emotions and never shies from even the hardest things.”
The prize, given annually by the government of Sweden, was first awarded in 2003. Previous winners have included Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, Shaun Tan, and Jacqueline Woodson. It comes with a cash prize of about $478,000.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
