I first came to know of Paula Fox through her adult fiction—primarily her incredible novel, Desperate Characters. So it was a surprise and pleasure to learn about her children’s books, which have won all sorts of awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the Newbery Medal, and an American Book Award.
Fox had a complicated and unsettled childhood, which is the subject of a fairly recent memoir and arguably an impetus for much of her writing. Here is an excerpt from a Guardian interview, in which she touches on her attraction to difficult subjects and her focus on children who find themselves outsiders: “I think what my growing up gave me was that I didn’t just swim like a goldfish, unaware of anything—water, my environment—I had leapt out of the bowl, so I could see in a certain way…I think I write mostly about children who, like me, are out of the bowl.”
