Book Awards
What did winning the Newbery Award mean to me? I’ve heard of writers who had their bags packed and ready in case the call came. I was simply enjoying my shredded wheat when the telephone rang with the wonderful announcement from Pat Scales, chair of the Newbery committee that year....
Readers. That’s what winning the Newbery Medal meant to me. Readers. Lots of them. I’ve known a few people who say they write just for themselves. Well, and maybe their mothers, too. Whether it’s a short story or an essay or a poem or a book. They say the writing...
(c) 2022 by Lois Lowry. From the May/June 2022 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: The Newbery Centennial....
Newbery Award titles are among the more visible of books for young readers. As such, they provide the opportunity to explore in microcosm a potential template that can be applied to the entire arena of books for children and teens. My book A Single Shard won the Newbery Medal in...
I began Sarah, Plain and Tall long ago in my 1790 New England house, while missing my Wyoming home. I sat in the music room with my dogs, watching my children take the school bus. I worked on a typewriter, listening to the noisy eraser cartridge slap back and forth....
Oh, I remember that evening. We were entertaining dinner guests, and the phone rang. I answered it, and listened, and then the call was over, so I returned to the table to report, except — and I remember this vividly — that the mental tape on which I had always...
Two-time winner Katherine Paterson (far right) with her family, celebrating her 1981 Newbery for Jacob Have I Loved. Photo courtesy of Katherine Paterson. Most awards are given soon after or even when they’re announced, but winners of the Newbery Medal are told on a morning in January and have until...
Susan Cooper at Pembroke College, Oxford, to give the Tolkien Lecture in 2017. Photo courtesy of Pembroke College Tolkien Lecture. The Newbery Award had no effect on my work, I believe — apart from making it temporarily harder, due to the mean little voice in one’s head that sneers: Okay,...
The Melchers at a Carnival of Books broadcast for the 1954 Newbery with winner Joseph Krumgold. Photo coutesy of the Melcher family. While my daughters and I are all avid readers who grew up enjoying award-winning children’s literature, we never had the opportunity to meet our relative, Frederic G. Melcher...
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