In recognition of “every child’s right to great stories,” the Swedish government created the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award to honor a “person or organization for their outstanding contribution to children’s and young adult literature.” This year’s winner is French writer Jean-Claude Mourlevat.
Mourlevat is a prolific writer of books for children and young adults, but in keeping with the fairy tale tradition, adults find pleasure and meaning in his stories, as well. According to the Swedish Arts Council, “Jean-Claude Mourlevat is a brilliant renewer of fairy tale traditions, open to both hardship and beauty. Time and space are suspended in his fictional worlds, and eternal themes of love and longing, vulnerability and war are portrayed in precise and dreamlike prose. Mourlevat’s ever-surprising work pins the fabric of ancient epic onto a contemporary reality.”
Selected works by Mourlevat have been translated to English, including the internationally-acclaimed Pull of the Ocean, as well as Winter’s End and Jefferson.