Worth over three quarters of a million dollars (one of the richest literary awards), nominations from 442 organisations worldwide and with previous laureates including Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman and Katherine Paterson, the Astrid Lindgren Award recognises that:
Good children’s literature gives the child a place in the world, and the world a place in the child.
The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 2008 goes to the Australian author Sonya Hartnett.
The jury’s motivation is as follows:
“Sonya Hartnett (Australia) is one of the major forces for renewal in modern young adult fiction. With psychological depth and a concealed yet palpable anger, she depicts the circumstances of young people without avoiding the darker sides of life. She does so with linguistic virtuosity and a brilliant narrative technique; her works are a source of strength.”
There is a .pdf presentation on the site about Sonya Hartnett, which includes this quote from a lecture she gave in 2004:
A young person who reads a book today takes that book into tomorrow, is shaped and influenced by the work, learns from it, remembers it, holds it inside. And because this happens to books written for the young, children's and Young Adult literature is important - more important, one could argue, than writing for adults.
There were 155 nominees for the 2008 award - the list is here. Among the nominees (and I'll freely admit that my knowledge, limited by being an English speaker, means that these names are more familiar to me than writers in, say, Spanish or Estonian or Japanese):
- David Almond
- Aidan Chambers
- Quentin Blake
- John Burningham
- Anthony Browne
- Jean Craighead George
- Tomie de Paola
- Wolf Erlbruch (go the mole!!)
- Russell Hoban
- Eva Ibbotson
- John Marsden
- Walter Dean Myers
- Diana Wynne Jones
- Lisbeth Zwerger
- Sydney Morning Herald article about Hartnett's win
- another SMH article
- Guardian (UK)
- News.com.au
- The Age
- CBC (Canada)
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