US author Laurie Halse Anderson wins the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award

American author Laurie Halse Anderson has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award with judges praising her “richly expressive novels for young people” which give “voice to the adolescent experience with sometimes brutal honesty”.

The announcement for the world richest children’s book prize (five million SEK [£400,000]) was made at a dual ceremony at today’s (7th March) Bologna Children’s Book Fair and in Stockholm. 

Boel Westin, the prize jury’s chair, said Halse Anderson “writes about challenging topics in a way that both engages and moves us. There is a passion in her writing that goes straight to the heart." 

Potsdam, New York-born and now Philadelphia-based Halse Anderson first worked as a journalist before publishing her initial children’s book, Nditio Runs, in 1996. Her breakout was the bestselling and award-winning Speak (1999), later adapted into a film starring Kristen Stewart. The novel’s honest and nuanced depiction of surviving sexual assault was partly based on Halse Anderson’s experience of being raped at the age of 13. 

Halse Anderson’s other key titles include Wintergirls, about two girls’ eating disorders; The Impossible Knife of Memory, about a girl who hides her father’s PTSD and alcoholism from others; and the Seeds of America trilogy, an exploration of Revolution-era America from an enslaved girl’s point of view. 

The judges committee added: “In her tightly written novels for young adults, Laurie Halse Anderson 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.”