Katherine Paterson
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson was born on October 31, 1932, in Qing Jiang, Jiangsu Province, China, the daughter of American Presbyterian missionaries. She spent her early childhood in China and moved to the United States in 1940. Her itinerant upbringing across multiple states, always the new child who did not quite fit in, gave her an intimate knowledge of the pain of social exclusion and the desperate need for friendship that would animate her most celebrated work. She studied English literature at King College in Bristol, Tennessee, then earned a master of arts in Christian education from the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia. She served as a missionary teacher in Japan for four years, an experience that deepened her understanding of cultural displacement and has left its mark on several of her novels.
Paterson began publishing fiction for young readers in the early 1970s. Her first major award came with The Master Puppeteer (1975), set in eighteenth-century Japan, which won the National Book Award for Children’s Books. Bridge to Terabithia (1977), her most celebrated novel, grew directly from a devastating personal experience: the death of her son David’s best friend Lisa Hill, who was struck by lightning on a beach in Virginia in 1974. The novel follows Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke, two children who create an imaginary kingdom called Terabithia in the woods near their rural Virginia home, and confronts with shattering directness the sudden, arbitrary death of a child and the grief of those left behind. The book’s refusal of consolation, its insistence on the reality and weight of loss, made it both one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools and one of the most important works in the history of children’s literature.
Bridge to Terabithia won the Newbery Medal in 1978 and has sold millions of copies worldwide. It has been adapted for film twice, most recently in a 2007 adaptation by Walden Media. Paterson’s subsequent novels, including Jacob Have I Loved (1980, Newbery Medal) and Come Sing, Jimmy Jo (1985), confirmed her as one of the foremost American children’s authors of the twentieth century.
Paterson served as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature from 2010 to 2011, was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1998, and received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2006, the highest honour in children’s literature. She is widely regarded as one of the most important voices in the history of American children’s fiction, a writer who has consistently insisted that children’s literature must be capable of bearing the full weight of human experience.
