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How to pronounce Elana K. Arnold: uh-LAH-nuh
Elana K. Arnold is the award-winning author of many books for children and teens, including The House That Wasn't There, the Printz Honor winner Damsel, the National Book Award finalist What Girls Are Made Of, and the Global Read Aloud selection A Boy Called Bat. She is a member of the faculty at Hamline University's MFA in writing for children and young adults program, and lives in Long Beach, CA, with her husband, two children, and a menagerie of animals.
Elana K. Arnold's website
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Congratulations on your YA novel, The Blood Years, winning the 2024 Sydney Taylor Book Award and the 2024 Young Adult Literature Award from the National Jewish Book Awards. A tale of WWII survival, I understand that the story was inspired by your own grandmother's experience in Holocaust-era Romania. Can you talk about why you decided to write this story, specifically for a young adult audience?
I have always been an enormous fan of my grandmother's storytelling abilities. She told me stories all my life. They got deeper and more complex the older I got, and one of my favorite subjects was true stories about her life. I heard snippets of her war years growing up, and she started with the sweet, funny stories: going to the countryside, having the geese chase her, her terrible sister, dance class, her wonderful grandfather, her mother who wouldn't get out of bed, and all of those things.
As I got older, I started to ask more and more questions. I knew she was Jewish and I knew she survived the Holocaust. Her experience as a Jew in Czernowitz, Romania was different from, but in many ways the same as, Jews across Eastern Europe. It felt like a story I needed to tell, but it took me many years to feel that I was a writer who could even ...
Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of&#... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Blood Years
Try:
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
Susan Meissner is a USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction with more than three-quarters of a million books in readers' hands and translations in eighteen languages. She is an author, speaker and writing workshop ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Blood Years
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Only the Beautiful
by Susan Meissner
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