MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – Before winning the most prestigious prize in children’s literature, Kelly Barnhill took a little detour.
Barnhill, named Monday as this year’s winner of the John Newbery Medal for her fantasy novel “The Girl Who Drank the Moon,” started writing children’s stories in her late 20s – after two kids and a yearslong hiatus from the craft she studied as an undergraduate.
“I was doing all the wacky stuff that early 20s people did,” Barnhill said in a telephone interview. “I worked for the National Park Service, I got trained as a volunteer firefighter, I went to Florida for a little while, I fell in love, I had my first baby when I was 25 and moved back to Minnesota, got my teaching license and was really not writing at all during that time.”
She said she wasn’t “drawn back to the page” until after she had her second baby girl and began making a dent in a stack of library books, starting with “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse” by Louise Erdrich.
“That book unlocked something in me and I’ve been writing ever since,” she said.