Laurie Halse Anderson – laureate 2023 1
Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and, even more str
ongly, the myth of Perspehone. In the myth, Persephone is taken to the underworld by Hades, ruler of the dead, and only allowed to return to the surface in the summer months. The myth forms a telling parallel to the winter girls, who also balance between life and death. The role of time and memory in young adult development is a major narrative force in The Impossible Knife of Memory (2014). Hayley and her father have moved back to the city she grew up in so that Hayley can finish school there. The father is a war veteran who has PTSD and abuses alcohol in order to repress painful memories. Hayley has to be the grown-up in the family. She lives in a state of constant worry about her father and hides her difficult situation from her school and the authorities. Although she describes her daily life, school friends, and the adult world with cynicism and a dry, dispassionate wit, it is obvious that Hayley is repressing difficult memories from her childhood. Not until she meets Finn— who wins her trust—can she finally begin to process her experiences. Anderson’s first historical novel was Fever 1793 (2000), a story about the yellow fever epidemic in the United States in the late eighteenth century. But her greatest historical project 18 is the trilogy Seeds of America. The trilogy opens in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, and unfolds during and after the period of the American Revolution: the conflict between the English and the Patriots that led to a number of Eastern states breaking free from British rule and forming the United States of America. Seeds of America builds on extensive research and seamlessly incorporates various forms of documentary evidence, including excerpts from letters, testimonies, diaries, and newspaper articles. One example is a newspaper advertisement from 1776 about an enslaved freedom seeker. Another is an excerpt from a petition for freedom addressed to the Massachusetts governor by a group of enslaved people in 1774. It has been said of Laurie Halse Anderson that “her books have changed lives,” and many people have testified to the significance of her work. That she maintains an open, intensive dialogue with her readers is clear. Two decades after its publication, Speak was reissued in an anniversary edition in 2019. In the same year, Anderson published Shout, her memoir-in-verse in which she writes about her own upbringing and how she found her way to books, reading, and language. In her introduction to the book, Anderson writes,