M.T. Anderson Nabs Boston Globe–Horn Book Award
RSSBy SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 06/06/2007
M. T. Anderson, Laura Vaccaro Seeger, and Nicolas Debon are top winners of this year’s Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards for excellence in children’s literature.
The annual awards are given in three categories: fiction and poetry, picture book, and nonfiction. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, about a Boston slave at the dawn of the Revolutionary War, nabbed the top fiction and poetry prize. The book was also winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was named a 2007 Printz Honor Book.
The best picture book went to Seeger for Dog and Bear: Two Friends, Three Stories (Porter/Roaring Brook), a tale of two buddies. An Emmy Award–winner for her television animation, Seeger began her picture book career in 2001, when she collaborated with her husband’s uncle, folksinger Pete Seeger, on I Had a Rooster.
Debon, the nonfiction winner for The Strongest Man in the World: Louis Cyr (Groundwood)—about a nineteenth-century French-Canadian strongman—started to write and illustrate when he lived in Toronto, where he spent a decade before returning to his native France.
The judges also selected two honor books in each category:
Fiction and Poetry:
Clementine written (Hyperion) by Sara Pennypacker, illustrated by Marla Frazee
Rex Zero and the End of the World (Kroupa/Farrar) by Tim Wynne-Jones
Picture Book:
365 Penguins (Abrams) written by Jean-Luc Fromental, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet
Wolves (Simon) written and illustrated by Emily Gravett
Nonfiction:
Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion (Houghton) by Loree Griffin Burns
Escape: The Story of the Great Houdini (Greenwillow) by Sid Fleischman
The 2007 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award ceremony will be held on Friday, October 12, 2007, at the Boston Athenaeum in Boston, MA.
