Kathryn Lasky

Kathryn Lasky is the renowned author of fiction and nonfiction for children, young adults, and (under the name Kathryn Lasky Knight) adults. Her nonfiction books for young readers are diverse in subject, ranging from wildlife photography to weaving, maple syrup to paleoanthropology. She often collaborates with her husband, filmmaker and photographer Christopher G. Knight, and together they have created several highly acclaimed photographic essays for children. These include Sugaring Time, a Newbery Honor Book, The Weaver’s Gift, winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction, and Think Like an Eagle. Kathryn Lasky’s book, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, is a picture book biography of the ancient mathematician Eratosthenes. In recognition of the body of her nonfiction work, Kathryn Lasky received the Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Award in 1986.

“People often ask me how and why I do both fiction and nonfiction,” says Kathryn Lasky. “ I am equally attracted to both types of writing because for me the most important thing is that a story be real. Real stories can be either fiction or nonfiction. Even in my nonfiction books, telling a story is more important than reciting the facts.

“I still don’t really know when I began thinking of myself as a real writer. It might have been relatively recently – like when I first got paid for a manuscript. But that might have been only when I first dared to call myself a writer to the world at large. I think that perhaps I always felt that this was my profession, announced or unannounced, paid or unpaid. I have always been a writer.”

Raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kathryn Lasky received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a master’s degree in early childhood education from Wheelock College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, Christopher Knight, and their two children, Max and Meribah.

Website: http://www.kathrynlasky.com/KK/Home.html