You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Meg Rosoff wins Astrid Lindgren Award
Meg Rosoff has been announced as the winner of the 2016 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
The award is run by the Swedish Arts Council in honour of Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish author of Pippi Longstocking who died in 2002. It is the biggest international award for children’s and YA literature and comes with a prize of SEK 5m (£432,000).
The jury said Rosoff’s novels, which include How I Live Now and Picture Me Now (Penguin Random House), “speak to the emotions as well as the intellect”.
They added: “In sparkling prose, she writes about the search for meaning and identity in a peculiar and bizarre world. Her brave and humorous stories are one of a kind. She leaves no reader unmoved… Like Astrid Lindgren, Rosoff empathises completely with young people and is utterly loyal to them.”
More than 200 authors, illustrators and organisations were longlisted for the prize this year, with 21 coming from the UK.
Jacqueline Wilson, David Almond, Raymond Briggs, Patrick Ness and Neil Gaiman were all longlisted this year, as were illustrators Michael Foreman and Oliver Jeffers, and organisations Letterbox Club and Book Aid International.
