Lois Lowry - About the Author
Lois Lowry has stated that she was "a solitary child who lived in the world of books and my own imagination." Because her father was a career military officer, Lowry lived all over the world with her parents, her older sister Helen, and her younger brother Sam. She was born in Hawaii, moved from there to New York, and also lived in Pennsylvania and Tokyo. The author went to high school in New York City and began college at Brown University in Rhode Island.
After finishing her sophomore year of college, Lowry married a naval officer. They soon had four children under the age of five. She later returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, received a degree, and went on to graduate school. Lowry then began to write professionally as she had dreamed of doing since her childhood when she "endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks."
Lowry's marriage ended in 1977 when she was forty years old. That same year, the author's writing captivated young readers with her award-winning first novel, A Summer to Die. The novel is a "highly fictionalized retelling" of the early death of Lowry's sister and the effect of such a loss on a family. The author has written more than thirty books beloved by both children and adults, including stories about Anastasia Krupnik and her brother Sam. Ms. Lowry was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1990 for Number the Stars and again in 1994 for The Giver. She was the 2003 United States nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the highest international distinction given to any author or illustrator of children's books.
While her books have varied in content, Lowry has noted that to her "all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections." Through her writing she tries to convey her "passionate awareness that we live intertwined on this planet and that our future depends on our caring more, and doing more, for one another."
Ms. Lowry divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan terrier named Bandit, and a 235-year-old hilltop farmhouse in Maine surrounded by meadows, apple trees, flower gardens and wildlife.
-- Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
