Lois Lowry

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Award-winning writer Lois Lowry was born Lois Ann Hammersberg in Hawaii in 1937, but grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and Japan. She studied at Brown University and later gained prestige and popularity as a freelance journalist. Impressed by her writing skills, publishing house Houghton Mifflin encouraged her to write her first children's book, 'A Summer to Die,' published in 1977.

She has since written more than 30 books for children and published an autobiography. Two of her works have been awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal: 'Number the Stars' in 1990, and 'The Giver' in 1993. She has received countless other honors, including the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, the California Young Reader's Medal, and the Mark Twain Award. As an author, Lowry is known for writing about difficult subject matters within her works for children. She has explored such complex issues as racism, terminal illness, murder, and the Holocaust among other challenging topics. Ms Lowry now divides her time between Cambridge and her 1840s farmhouse.

Author's Comment: My books have varied in content and style. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections. 'A Summer to Die,' my first book, was a highly fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of such a loss on a family. 'Number the Stars,' set in a different culture and era, tells the same story: that of the role that we humans play in the lives of our fellow beings.

Nationality: American