E.L. Konigsburg

E.L. Konigsburg

Elaine Lobl Konigsburg

(February 10, 1930 – April 19, 2013)

Another two-time Newbery Medal winner, E.L. Konigsburg is also the only person to have won both a Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor (which is basically the award’s honorable mention) in the same year — for the first two books she ever wrote, no less: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, both submitted at once to her no-doubt thrilled publisher. A full 29 years later, in 1997, she won the medal again for The View from Saturday, another classic. Her work effortlessly describes the interior lives of children trying to discover their own personalities, perhaps because she has based many of her characters on her own children and students, who were, she says, “softly comfortable on the outside and solidly uncomfortable on the inside.” Perhaps one of the reasons that her work is so enduring is that that quality never quite completely goes away.