Linda Sue Park

At the end of the Korean War, a nineteen-year-old man and his wife immigrated to the United States of America. Together they would raise a girl who loved to read and who would go on to inspire millions of children to do the same. That girl, born in Urban, Illinois in 1960, grew up to be Newbery Award-winning author, Linda Sue Park.

During a 2015 Ted Talk, Linda shared about different aspects of her childhood including being surrounded by books, discovering a love of reading, having a father who taught his children to utilize and love the public library and the impact those events played in her life: “nothing astounded my father more than the American public library... Naturally he raised me and my siblings as faithful library patrons and for me this proved to have two enormous blessings... The books in the library showed me that there was a very big world out there, big enough even for misfits like me to eventually find a place... Even more important, books provided me with practice—practice at life. Life isn’t fair. We all need all the practice we can get at facing life’s unfairness with both grace and grit. The books I read showed me how other people faced unfairness in hundreds, thousands of different ways.”

Linda’s love of story and the written word is even more evident when considering her choices in educational pursuits and degrees earned. After graduating with a B.A. in English from Stanford University, she went on to earn a Higher Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College in Ireland and then an M.A. in Modern British Literature from Birkbeck College in England.

While in Ireland, she met and married journalist Ben Dobbin and together had two children. In 1990, the couple moved back to the United States and after several more years Linda began re-telling Korean folktales and began work on her first novel, Seesaw Girl, which was published in 1999. The roots she had planted and nourished from childhood through university had taken root and grown. Those efforts would begin, and continue, to bear fruits that would be a gift for innumerable children for many years to come. She would go on to write many picture books and novels for young people including the 2002 Newbery Medal winner A Single Shard and the New York Times bestseller A Long Walk to Water.

Part of her brilliance comes from understanding the audience whom she writes for and her purpose in doing so. In the same 2015 Ted Talk, she emphasized the power books and reading can have in a child’s life. She asked, “Can a children’s book save the world? No. But—the young people who read them can.” Her goal in writing for children is to provide stories and characters that children can empathize with because she understands that “empathy can ignite engagement”. However, this isn’t easily done and is only possible under certain conditions. She shared this key component, “In order to find yourself in a book, you first have to lose yourself in a book.” The best authors are master storytellers whose creations allow children to easily lose themselves in the narrative, discover connections to their own story, present opportunities to experience situations from a viewpoint different from their own and where they can begin to empathize with and recognize the humanity in others.

Linda Sue Park is just such an author and is powerfully doing her part in writing engaging stories that rise to this level of excellence. Her stories include characters that span different centuries, locations, and cultures where the characters are each experiencing “life’s unfairness”. She does not write down to children, but rather she writes truth on a level that is appropriate, real and which resonates with her audience. Her brilliance becomes even more obvious when one considers her ability to write across different genres, reading levels and topics. From picture books for the young to fantasy to historical fiction to books based on true stories, she has written something that will appeal to children of all ages (and their parents too!). She is truly one of our century’s master storytellers.