Booklist Video: E. Lockhart’s 2009 Printz Speech.
Engberg, Gillian (author).
FEATURE.
First published October 20, 2009 (Booklist Online).
Author E. Lockhart isn’t afraid of a good argument, as she made clear in her acceptance speech for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks at the 2009 Michael L. Printz Awards (administered by ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association and sponsored by Booklist). Readers have had wildly different responses to the book’s title character, a prep-school sophomore who uses her own secret, guerrilla tactics to infiltrate an all-male secret society. Lockhart said:
“Nothing has pleased me more than to receive mail denouncing Frankie as a borderline psychotic and other mail lauding her as a feminist heroine.”
Lockhart explained that for her books, and for all books, she feels that “there is no right reading.” And she spoke out against the notion of YA novels as billboards, or “moral lessons cloaked as entertainments.”
“Books are meant for complicated responses. . . . They are meant to be argued over, unpacked, disagreed with, loved and hated simultaneously, and reread at different times of life for different meanings.”
Don’t miss the rest of Lockhart’s speech, in which she talks about the eclectic influences, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories to the real-life San Francisco Suicide Club, which helped her shape her Printz Honor Book.
(Video edited by Daniel Kraus)
Click on the picture above or click here to watch the video.
[The Printz Award speeches appear on Booklist Online with the permission of YALSA.]