Katherine Paterson's Presentation

Today people around the world are celebrating Astrid Lindgren's 100^th birthday. I've been looking forward to this occasion for more than a year. It began on March 15^th 2006 when I was awakened at 6 a.m. by a phone call from Sweden. As soon as she heard the news, my five-year-old granddaughter could talk of nothing but the fact that she was going to meet a real princess. Her mother and I were a bit apprehensive. We knew that Crown Princess Victoria was slated to be at the award ceremonies, but we had no idea what the security measures would be, much less what the protocol was for meeting the future crowned head of Sweden. Jordan was busy practicing her curtsey, but I was uncertain. I sought advice from a number of Swedish people and and was told simply to follow her lead. "She's very down to earth," everyone said. "She'll probably offer to shake hands." Which is exactly what she did.

The princess and I were comfortably seated in chairs in front of the huge Skansen audience a few minutes before the ceremony began. She was just as down to earth as all her subjects had promised me she would be, so I felt free to mention that my grandchildren were eager to meet her and to ask if that would be possible. "Of course," she said, "but why don't we wait for the photographers so they can have their pictures taken?"

I thought that was a great idea, but somehow, each of my seven grandchildren found he or she had something to say to their grandmother that couldn't possibly wait until after the ceremony. They all made their way from their seats in the audience to speak to me, so, quite naturally, I had to introduce them to the princess who shook hands with each one, asked their names and greeted them all as cordially as if they had been a diplomatic delegation.

Of course, when the paparazzi lined up to take pictures afterwards, my seven grandchildren were right there again to have themselves photographed with their old friend, her royal highness.

Jordan, especially, was thrilled. When the photography session ended, she asked her mother, "Now are we famous?" Samantha assured her she was. She skipped over to me and happily took my hand to walk to the restaurant on the grounds where the reception for all the famous people in attendance was being held.

When we went in, there on the table where guests were being checked in was the same picture of her grandmother that had been posted on the stage and in various sites around the city. We started up the stairs and there at the top of the stairs was yet another picture of her grandmother--this one nearly the size of her own front door. She took one look, sighed deeply, and began to shake her head. "Nana. Nana. Nana," she said.

"Are you tired of Nana, Jordan?" I asked.

"Yes."

Well, who could blame her? Grandmothers are not supposed to be famous and neither, at least in this country, are children's writers. Those of us who are a part of the American world of children's books are a little bit in awe of the Swedish people. They have made a hero of a person who came to prominence not because of royal blood or victory in battle or political power, who was never a movie star or a rock musician, but a person who is famous because she wrote books that children love to read. Think of that! She is a hero because she wrote books that children love to read.

Of course, Astrid Lindgren was more than simply a children's writer. She was also an eloquent spokesperson for justice and peace, but if she had not been the creator of Pippi Longstocking, who would have listened to her? It was her writing for children that made people listen to her powerful voice.

One delightful bonus the award gave me was the impetus to re-read the books by Astrid Lindgren that I had read years ago and to read others that I had never read. And it struck me that this hero of the Swedish people has created through her writing a host of most unlikely heroes from the outrageous Pippi Longstocking to the fearful Scotty Lionheart. Well, I have a lot of unlikely heroes myself, but unlike Astrid Lindgren, I don't write fantastic fiction. While Mio can soar on the back of Mirimis over water and mountain on his quest, Jesse Aarons must rely on an old rope to swing across that dried up creek bed into Terabithia.

So the means by which our young heroes pursue their quests are quite different, but in their heart of hearts perhaps they are not so different after all.

In one of the many interviews I have had with the Swedish press, a journalist asked me if I didn't see a relationship between Astrid Lindgren's Mio My Son and my own book, Bridge to Terabithia. At that time I hadn't read Mio, My Son, so I couldn't answer the question. But now I have and I can say, first of all, that both Jesse and Mio are alike in that neither of them has the kind of courage we seem to demand of heroes.

Remember the moment when Mio realizes that he must go to Outer Land and is astonished to find out that Pompoo, the Sorrowbird, the hundred horses, the entire Forest of Moonlight, everyone seems to know he must go except he himself.

"And my father the King . . ." I whispered.

"Your father the King has always known it," said Pampoo.

"Does he want me to go?" I asked, and I couldn't help the little quaver in my voice.

"Yes, he wants it," said Pompoo. "He mourns, but he wants you to go."

"Yes, but I'm so scared," I said and I began to cry.

I love this scene. And although my realistic fiction is very different from Lindgren's magical tale, and my usual reader a bit older than hers, the scene reminds me of one from Bridge to Terabithia;

". . . he awoke in the night with the horrible realization that it was still raining. He would just have to tell Leslie that he wouldn't go to Terabithia. After all, she had told him that when she was working on the house with Bill. And he hadn't questioned her. It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing-one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye and cheek and jaw should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts. He hardly slept the rest of the night, listening to the horrid rain and knowing that no matter how high the creek came, Leslie would still want to cross it.

Two unlikely heroes. Mio, as every Swedish child knows, takes up his quest, despite his fears, conquers the evil Sir Kato, brings home the stolen children and the stolen colt, and returns at last to the waiting arms of his beloved father. In short, despite his fears, he becomes a hero in the classic mode.

Jesse's triumph is not so glorious. He lives in the mundane world of realism, not in fantasy's exalted realm. He cannot steal Leslie back from death. The most we can hope is that out of this devastating tragedy, he will be able to grow-in wisdom and compassion.

Perhaps Astrid Lindgren always knew it, but I came to know it later in life. The courage of a hero is not fearlessness. The hero takes the action valor demands despite his or her fears.

I heard a story not long ago, and because I didn't rush to write it down I can't remember where I heard it or read it. The person telling the story said that he was talking to a group of children and he asked them to write down the names of their personal heroes. Some wrote down the names of sports or entertainment figures, some wrote down the names of parents or other relatives, a few wrote down the names of political leaders, mostly dead ones. One girl turned in a blank page. When he asked her about it, she shrugged. She didn't have any heroes, she said. It was only later that he realized the problem. She thought that heroes must be perfect human beings. She knew from the media all the sins and foibles of the famous. She knew from experience that no one she was close to was perfect. So how could anyone of them be a hero?

We live in an age that delights in tearing down, rather than building up. Where once, in our country, historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were glorified, now they are made fun of for their false teeth or bad habits, or their contributions are dismissed because they themselves did not live perfectly by the ideals they espoused. How can the great Henry Thoreau be a hero? While he was supposedly living the simple life close to nature at Walden Pond, his mother was washing his shirts!

But human beings are neither to be glorified or dismissed. And the same goes for the people who live in books. If Mio and Jess are unlikely heroes because they are fearful, then Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking and my Gilly Hopkins are unlikely heroes because they are not models of good behavior.

In America if you say Astrid Lindgren, the person you are speaking to will immediately smile and say: "Oh, yes, Pippi Longstocking." But I have been interested that some parents who said that as children they had loved the book, found themselves somewhat disturbed by it when they read it aloud to their own children. In other words, as children they were Tommy and Annika, but now that they were mothers, they had turned into Mrs. Settergren. Well, that's natural, perhaps. I'm not sure how many of us parents today would let our children run over to Villa Villekula to play unsupervised. But sometimes our extreme carefulness robs our children of a lot of joy. And besides, the outrageous delight children find in Pippi's antics is very safe-contained, as it is, between the covers of a book.

As many of you know, the 2007 winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award was not a writer or an illustrator, but Banco del Libro, a Venzuelan organization that I got to know through the International Board of Books for Young People (IBBY). In 1998 I was the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, which is an award given biennially by IBBY to a children's writer and illustrator for his or her body of work. The following year, the United States Board of Books for Young People, thrilled that an American had won the Andersen prize, gave me a wonderful gift. They gave me 13,000 dollars-- that I would have the privilege of giving away. It was up to me to choose some group-anywhere in the world--that was helping to bring children and books together. Needless to say, I felt a heavy responsibility to use this gift wisely.

I was still pondering a choice when in December I read the newspaper accounts of a horrendous catastrophe in Venezuela. I sent an e-mail to Caracas, to Carmen Diana Dearden, past president of IBBY. Carmen Diana was the person who had handed me the medal in New Delhi and she had subsequently become a friend. The timing, was providential. Carmen Diana had been consulting with her colleagues in Banco del Libro as to what, beyond physical necessities, they could do for the devastated survivors. The tragedy, as it is called in Venezuela, occurred when the coastal mountain range swollen by months of heavy rains simply collapsed along its river and stream beds killing thousands of people and leaving countless others bereaved and homeless. Carmen Diana told me the mountain looked as if a gigantic tiger had clawed the slopes, leaving gouges of destruction from peak to valley.

Using a four-wheel drive to take them over the mountain since the road was impassable, the volunteers first went to a small school in the Barrio of Quenepe. They had sent word ahead that the story-tellers were coming, and the frightened, exhausted people of the community came and brought their children for an afternoon of respite. In the midst of a story there was a rumbling sound. Everyone, including the story teller, froze. Even the fearless Carmen Diana sidled over to the window to see if the mountain was once more collapsing. She assured everyone that it was just a plane taking off from the newly opened airport in the town nearby and the story continued. Before the afternoon was over, books had been read aloud, games played and the volunteers and people of the community were singing together.

Afterwards two parents came up and asked to borrow books. It hadn't been a part of the original plan, but the volunteers said, "Of course." And those two parents, one a mother, the other a father, took the books home, gathered their family and neighbors and began to have story time in their own homes.

Banco del Libro had planned to train teachers, and they did. But they also decided to train parents. A team coordinator and her group of volunteers met with these first parents and teachers once a week for five months. As part of the training each week, Carmen Diana decided to read aloud a Spanish translation of my book Bridge to Terabithia.

When she got to place in the story when it begins to rain, she could feel the tension mounting in the room. "Shall I stop reading?" she asked. "Yes." There was a long pause, then someone said: "No. Go on." She read straight to the end of the book that same afternoon. "Everyone was crying including me," she said. And then the mother they called "Shy Maria" to distinguish her from the other Maria, said quietly: "I think this means that we must begin to build our own new bridges."

And build them they did. At last count Read to Live, as the project was named, had well over 90 lending centers in in the state of Vargas. The local leaders are teachers and parents, some of whom went back to school to learn how to read well enough to share books with their children and neighbors. People whose only reading in the past was the occasional newspaper or magazine are not only discovering the joy of books, but are sharing that love with others. One participant told a leader: "Everything is so terrible after the tragedy, but now I know when I need peace, I can open a book and begin to read." As British philosopher, Roger Scruton has said, "The consolation of the imaginary is not imaginary consolation."

In late August of 2000, I went to Venezuela to see first hand some of the work of the Read to Live program.. The road was still not open all the way, but we drove down it as far as we could. The great scars were still visible on the mountain, though the fast growing greenery of the tropics was beginning to cover them. The great gullies which marked the paths of the destruction remained. In them were the huge boulders that the floods and mud slides brought down. Thousands of bodies remained buried beneath the rocks and dried mud and will never be recovered. Tens of thousands of the living were still homeless. Children had lost parents and parents children. No one had been untouched.

School was on vacation, so we met in Jennifer's house across from the school in Quenepe where the first session of Read to Live was held. In her living room were those first parents who came and who now had made for themselves lovely yellow banners (to match the yellow book bags) announcing that their homes were Read to Live homes where their neighbors could come for story-telling and reading. A number of them were now working with children beyond their own neighborhoods. They introduced themselves to me with Carmen Diana's interpreting. Shy Maria read a thank you letter she had written. Betty told about her work in the tent city with the still homeless children.

"Tell them your anecdote, Nancy," someone said. "I work," said Nancy, "with children who are very disturbed by the tragedy. Most of them have to be on medication. Recently I decided to read to them Willy the Dreamer." [ For those of you who have never met Willy, he is British writer and illustrator Anthony Browne's timid little chimpanzee who is bullied by a gang of gorillas.] "After I finished reading," Nancy said, "one of the most troubled and troublesome boys came up to me. 'You don't have to give me any more medicine,' he said. 'I'm going to be like Willy the Dreamer.' He hasn't had any more medicine since that time," Nancy said. "And he's doing okay."

As my part in the sharing, I told them how I had come to write Bridge to Terabithia after our son's best friend had been struck by lightning, and these new friends, who had endured the loss of thousands, wept for the death of one little North American girl they had never met, but whose story had spoken to the chaos of their lives.

In 2004 these wonderful folks in Venezuela, sent help and advice to friends of mine in Indonesia who were ministering to the child survivors of the tsunami, and in 2006 a friend from Boston e-mailed to ask about the Venezuelan Read to Live project. Massachusetts was expecting several thousand hurricane Katrina evacuees at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, and Boston librarians wanted to fashion a similar program to help the children who were living through the horrors of our own national tragedy.

IBBY, the organization that started this chain of compassion, was founded by Jella Lepman, a Jew who escaped Hitler's Germany, only to return and establish the International Youth Library in Munich and go on to launch IBBY which she envisioned as an organization that would be a bridge for peace through children's books. What she said in 1946 about the founding of the youth library expresses her hope for IBBY as well.

"We are searching for ways to acquaint the children of Germany with children's books from all nations. . . These children carry no responsibility for this war, and that is why books for them should be the first messengers of peace."

Children's books are a means of growth and of healing. As they cross the artificial boundaries of adult hatreds they can become messengers of peace.

People often ask me why I have chosen to write for children. I used to feel that I needed to defend my choice of audience to the adult world that tends to look down its literary nose at those of us who write for the young. But I realized some time ago that it is they who need to explain their lack of respect, not only for children in general, but for the child each of them surely once was.

Readers do not suddenly emerge fully formed, ready to take on Madam Bovary or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Usually they begin as the fortunate infants who hear nursery rhymes on a parent's knee and the five year olds who fall asleep listening to fairy tales. They are the children who live in a world of books and thrill with delight when they come to realize one day that they have broken the secret code-they can read for themselves. They are the children who find the key to a secret garden and sail on ships searching for pirate treasure-children who know the boundless world of books as they grow into the readers who will walk the snowy streets of Turkey with Orhan Pamuk or argue the merits of the newest translation of War and Peace.

The essayist Barry Lopez speaks eloquently about the power of the story to heal-"to repair a spirit in disarray." To heal means to make whole. This is more than patching up, putting a bandage on a wound. It is more than simple catharsis, the purging of the emotions. Healing here is concerned with growing, with becoming. And that is why children's books are so important. We don't come into this world fully human. We become human, we become whole, and the stories we hear and read as children are vital nourishment in this process of becoming fully human.

Astrid Lindgren knew this truth and lived this truth. So do my friends of Banco del Libro and other writers, illustrators and children's book and literacy advocates around the world. The Swedish people know this, and so do all of you gathered here tonight. It is an honor to celebrate with you her 100^th birthday and her continuing legacy. As the Japanese say, Banzai- Hooray! Live ten thousand years!