Applegate, Klassen, Lake Win Newbery, Caldecott, Printz
Katherine Applegate has won the 2013 Newbery Medal for The One and Only Ivan (Harper); Jon Klassen has won the 2013 Randolph Caldecott Medal for This Is Not My Hat (Candlewick); and Nick Lake has won the 2013 Michael L. Printz Award for In Darkness (Bloomsbury). The awards were announced Monday morning at the American Library Association's midwinter conference in Seattle.
Katherine Applegate on Winning the 2013 Newbery: 'Stunned Disbelief'
Normally Katherine Applegate would have been in her house in San Francisco the morning that “the call” came in. But she’d been visiting family in Richmond, Va., with her 13-year-old daughter, and found herself in a hotel room 3000 miles from home when the phone rang. Her daughter had caught a bug and was running a fever, and Applegate’s mind was not on the Newbery committee. “It just never crossed my radar screen,” she said. “They told me it was the medal, and I asked, ‘Are you sure?’ ”
2013 Caldecott Caps Busy Year for Jon Klassen
Jon Klassen was up early on Monday morning – not because he was expecting a career-changing phone call, but because he had a plane to catch. The author-illustrator was due to fly from his Los Angeles home to San Jose, Calif., where he’s working on an animation and illustration project a few days a week. I was on my way out to catch a cab and I didn’t think much about waiting for a phone call” from the Caldecott committee, he said. “You try not to think about things like that.” But the call did arrive, at about 6:30 a.m., to tell him that This Is Not My Hat had won the Medal.
'Pure Shock and Surprise' for 2013 Printz Winner Nick Lake
For many recipients of the Caldecott, Newbery, and Printz Medals, the phone calls from the award committees come while the first pot of coffee is brewing or the kids have just been sent off to school. Not so for this year’s Printz winner, Nick Lake, who lives near Oxford, England, where he’s publishing director at HarperCollins Children’s Books. Lake, who won the Printz on Monday for his novel In Darkness, had been working at home for hours when the phone rang.
Can He Top 'Hat'? Canadian animator Jon Klassen has a stellar start in picture books
A lot of things astonished Jon Klassen about the reception given his first picture book, I Want My Hat Back: hearing Daniel Pinkwater read it aloud on NPR, being invited to talk about it with Martha Stewart on TV, learning it had become an Internet meme.
Q & A with Katherine Applegate
In her bestselling Animorphs series, Katherine Applegate introduced teens with the ability to morph into any animal they touch. She offers a very different take on an animal story in The One and Only Ivan, which is based on a real-life silverback gorilla born in Africa that lived in a glass box for 27 years in a circus-themed mall. Ivan's story made a splash in the media and caught the attention of Applegate, who talks about how her novel came to be.
