Lois Lowry

Lois Ann Lowry is an American writer. She is the author of several books for children and young adults, including The Giver Quartet, Number the Stars, and Rabble Starkey. She is known for writing about complicated subject matters, dystopias, and complex themes in works for young audiences.

Lowry has won two Newbery Medals: for Number the Stars in 1990 and The Giver in 1994. Her book Gooney Bird Greene won the 2002 Rhode Island Children's Book Award. Many of her books have been challenged or banned in some schools and libraries. For example, the Giver, common in some schools' curricula, has been prohibited in others.

Lowry first began her career as a freelance journalist. Then, in the 1970s, she submitted a short story to Redbook magazine, which was intended for adult audiences but written from a child's perspective. An editor working at Houghton Mifflin then suggested to Lowry that she should write a children's book. Lowry agreed and wrote her first book, A Summer to Die, later published by Houghton Mifflin in 1977 when she was 40. The book features the theme of terminal illness, based on Lowry's experiences with her sister Helen.

Lowry continued to write about complex topics in her following publication, Autumn Street (1979), which explores themes of coping with racism, grief, and fear at a young age. The novel is told from the perspective of a young girl who is sent to live with her grandfather during World War II, which is also based on her own experiences of having her father deployed during World War II. Autumn Street is considered the most autobiographical of all her published books.

In the same year as publishing Autumn Street, Lowry also published her novel Anastasia Krupnik, the first installment in the Anastasia series. The series, which touches on serious themes with a humorous approach, continued until 1995.

Lowry published Number the Stars in 1989, which book received multiple awards, including the 1990 Newbery medal. Lowry received another Newbery medal in 1994 for The Giver (1993). After publishing The Giver, she went on to publish another three companion novels, which take place in the same universe: Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004), and finally, Son (2012), which tied all three of the previous books together. Collectively, they are referred to as The Giver Quartet. The New York Times described the quartet as "less a speculative fiction than a guide for teaching children (and their parents, if they're listening carefully) how to be a good person."

In early 2020, she released a book of poetry called On the Horizon, charting her childhood memories of life in Hawaii and Tokyo and the lives lost during the attack on Pearl Harbor and the bombing of Hiroshima.

During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the American publishing company Scholastic Corporation asked Lowry to write a new introduction to Like the Willow Tree, a story of a young girl living in Portland, Maine, who was orphaned during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. The book was first published in 2011 before being reissued by Scholastic in September 2020.