Laurie Halse Anderson

Laurie Halse Anderson is an American author whose novels for children and young adults are noted for confronting difficult subjects with emotional directness and close attention to adolescent experience. Her best-known contemporary novel, Speak, follows a teenage girl struggling to recover her voice after sexual assault, while Wintergirls examines eating disorders and The Impossible Knife of Memory explores the effects of a parent’s post-traumatic stress. Anderson has twice been a National Book Award finalist, for Speak and Chains. She received the 2009 Margaret A. Edwards Award for her lasting contribution to young-adult literature and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2023.

Anderson’s historical fiction concentrates particularly on the American Revolutionary era and the experiences of young people whose lives are often marginalised in traditional accounts of national history. Fever 1793 depicts a teenage girl’s struggle for survival during Philadelphia’s devastating yellow-fever epidemic, while the Seeds of America trilogy—Chains, Forge and Ashes—examines slavery, military service and contested ideas of liberty during the American Revolution through Isabel and Curzon, two enslaved young people seeking freedom. Her later novel Rebellion 1776 returns to the Revolution through the story of a kitchen maid caught between political unrest, a smallpox epidemic and arguments over inoculation. Through these novels, Anderson combines detailed historical research with stories about personal agency, endurance and the contradiction between revolutionary ideals and continuing enslavement.