Meg Rosoff Wins Lindgren Award

Meg Rosoff, known for novels like How I Live Now and Just In Case, is the 2016 winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest cash prize for children’s literature.

The 5 million Swedish krona award honors the entire body of an author’s work. The award jury selected Rosoff out of 215 candidates from 59 countries.

The Astrid Lindgren memorial award is administered by the Swedish Arts Council. It is given authors, illustrators, oral storytellers and reading promoters for work “of the highest artistic quality” featuring the “humanistic values” of the late Pippi Longstocking author, for whom the award is named. Lindgren died in 2002 at the age of 94.

Rosoff told The Guardian Pippi Longstocking was “absolutely a hero of mine when I was a kid, because she was a maverick. I was told my whole life that I needed to be a nice girl, and then there’s Pippi in huge boots carrying a horse around. I couldn’t have had a better hero.”