Polly Horvath

Polly Horvath (born January 30, 1957 in Kalamazoo , Michigan ) is a Canadian writer who writes books for children and young people and comes from the United States .

Her books for children and young people have won several literary prizes. So her book won Everything on a Waffle 2002 to Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize , The Canning Season 2003 the National Book Award , in 2005 for the Italian translation of La stagione delle conserve the Premio Andersen , and 2,010 Horvath received the Canadian Vicky Metcalf Award .

Life

Polly Horvath was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her mother Betty Ferguson wrote picture books , her father John Horvath worked for the CIA until his forties and then married Polly Horvath's mother. Polly Horvath began writing stories at the age of eight. During her teenage years she attended a ballet - summer camp in Elliot Lake , Ontario that changed all their lives according to their own words, and they literally after Canada withdrew. She attended the Canadian College of Dance in Toronto , where she also studied at the Royal Academy of Dance , where she graduated as a RAD teacher and initially worked as a ballet teacher. At 23, she sent the manuscript of her first book, An Occasional Cow , to a publisher for the first time. It wasn't published until six years later. She lived in New York and Montreal before moving to Metchosin on the south of Vancouver Island in British Columbia , where she has lived since 1991.

Horvath's youth novel Everything on a Waffle , which was not only able to win the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize but also the Newbery Medal , is said to have not been a great pleasure to write. She would have had the most fun when she got to the last page. Eleven-year-old Primrose's story recounts an orphaned girl's experience of human nature in a small fishing village in British Columbia after she lost her parents at sea.

Her books have been translated into eight languages, including Danish , German , French , Italian and Japanese .

Polly Horvath is married to the University of Victoria computer science teacher , journalist and author Arnie Keller. The couple have two daughters.

reception

Literary scholars critically noted that some of their works also belong to that almost traditional form of children's and youth books in which uncles and aunts would take over the parenting roles of orphans , as for example in No More Cornflakes (1990), Everything on a Waffle ( 2001), Vacation (2005) and The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (2007).

Other forms of approximation emphasize that Horvath - when she once recreated the characters of her stories on the kitchen floor with kitchen utensils when she was a child - to a certain extent predetermined the importance of cooking and baking in her books. The aforementioned Primrose finds consolation and pivotal point in the local restaurant The Girl on the Red Swing , where everything - as the book title Everything on a Waffle suggests - is served on a waffle : even meat, lasagne , potatoes and waffles. With the help of meals, she overcomes her grief in the memory of meals with her parents, and accordingly the writer herself added a recipe at the end of each chapter. Even if the stories and lively characters in her books would not always develop in a way that would suit the general public's taste, her characters have integrity , the dialogues spirit with general pun.

The reviewer Michael Schmitt of the Süddeutsche Zeitung felt with Der Blaubeersommer that the story developed too slowly at the beginning, but would ultimately be presented convincingly, which would give the basic story of all episodes a thoroughly refined essence. Thus, one can overlook the somewhat too much help in life, since at the end of the day there is the positive moral that a long and good life can follow a difficult childhood.

Gerda Wurzenberger found in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung to Die Trolle that Horvath was resurrecting such an amusingly peculiar family clan through the stories of her character Aunt Sally that one did not even want to know whether it was fictional or real. Guido Graf , who writes for Die Welt , sketched in detail and enthusiastically the Big Holidays as a road movie that was sometimes “brash” .

The meeting Sylvia Schwab in Germany radio culture to our house was also quite positive: "Polly Horvath wrote a cheerful, crazy, lovable summer story full of funny scenes, strange events, strange characters and wonderful summer hours on the beach. But the idyll is not a Bullerby, it has breaks. (...) But Polly Horvath keeps the balance between the funny and the sad, the happy and the serious. It gives the book something floating, light - it looks like a bright summer day after a thunderstorm ”. Christine Lötscher from the Schweizer Tages-Anzeiger saw this in a somewhat more differentiated way: Horvath sees “childhood less as a transitional phase than as a constant borderline experience. While the parents try to teach the children that, firstly, they have to work, secondly, sleep in on the weekend and, thirdly, have their peace and quiet, the young protagonists move with open eyes and hearts through the constant state of emergency when life comes to meet them (...) Polly Horvaths Unmatched weird imagination and her dark, macabre humor make her books unmistakable. Because under all the joie de vivre and the lust for nonsense there is a deep melancholy that comes from the knowledge of the fragility of life, which the characters do not suppress, but which they bravely face with an almost grotesque devotion to the present. "

plant

• To Occasional Cow . Illustrations: Gioia Fiammenghi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1989, ISBN 978-0-374-35559-3
• No more corn flakes . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1990, ISBN 978-0-374-35530-2
• The Happy Yellow Car . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1994, ISBN 978-0-374-32845-0
• When the Circus Came to Town . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1996, ISBN 978-0-374-38308-4 .
  • Such a circus with the Halibuts! German translation by Gerda Bean , Aarau, Frankfurt a. M./Salzburg 1998, ISBN 3-7260-0507-2 .
• The trolls . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1999, ISBN 978-0-374-37787-8 . Shortlist , National Book Award Book of Honor, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award
  • The trolls . German translation by Brigitte Jakobeit . With pictures by Anja Reichel. Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-499-21129-7 .
• Everything on a waffle . Farrar Straus Giroux, New York 2001, ISBN 978-0-374-32236-6 Newbery Honor ; Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor; International White Ravens 2002; and Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize ( BC Book Prizes )
  • A long summer full of wonders . German translation by Heike Brandt . With pictures by Claudia Weikert. Beltz and Gelberg, Weinheim / Basel 2005, ISBN 3-407-79900-4 .
• The canning season . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2003, ISBN 978-0-374-39956-6 . Winner, 2003 National Book Award and 2004 Young Adult Canadian Book of the Year
  • The blueberry summer . Translation Christiane Buchner, Bloomsbury children's and youth books, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-8270-5246-9
• The Pepins and their Problems . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2004, ISBN 978-0-374-35817-4
  • The Peppin family can hardly save themselves . Illustrations by Marilyn Hafner. German by Christiane Buchner. Bloomsbury Children's & Youth Books, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8270-5076-2
• The Vacation . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2005, ISBN 978-0-374-38070-0
  • Big vacation . Translated by Christiane Buchner. Bloomsbury Children's & Youth Books, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8270-5163-9
• The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2007 ISBN 978-0-374-31553-5 . Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize ; Shortlisted 2007 Canadian Library Association's Young Adult Book of the Year
  • English: How we fixed the universe. Translated by Katrin Behringer. Bloomoon, Munich 2014 ISBN 9783845801995
• My One Hundred Adventures . Schwartz & Wade Books, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-375-84582-6 . NAPPA Gold Award winner, Parent's Choice Gold Award; and Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize
  • Our house by the sea . Illustration: Regina Kehn . Translation Christiane Buchner. Bloomsbury books for children and young people, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8270-5381-7
• M is for Mountie: an RCMP alphabet . Illustrations: Lorna Bennett. Sleeping Bear Press, Chelsea 2008, ISBN 978-1-58536-267-7 .
• Northward to the Moon . Schwartz & Wade Books, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-375-86110-9 .
• Mr. and Mrs. Bunny - Detectives Extraordinaires . Random House Children's Books 2012.

Adaptation

Audio book

• The blueberry summer . Narrator: Friedhelm Ptok . 4 CDs. Igel-Records, Dortmund 2006, ISBN 978-3-89353-142-4 .
• A long summer full of wonders . Narrator: Ina Gercke . Recipes in the booklet. 3 CDs, Igel-Records, Dortmund 2007, ISBN 978-3-89353-184-4 .
• Our house by the sea . Read by Ulrike C. Tscharre . 4 CDs. Igel-Records, Dortmund 2011, ISBN 978-3-89353-352-7

Web links

• Literature by and about Polly Horvath in the catalog of the German National Library
• www.pollyhorvath.com
• Podcast interview with Polly Horvath. podcast.de, This week Author Magazine's Editor . May 7, 2009.
• Interview about My One Hundred Adventures on powells.com
• Blaubeersommer , Book of the Month April 2005 ( Memento from July 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) at the Institute for Youth Literature , Vienna
• List of the English-language reviews
• Reviews:
  • Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit - The Super Detectives : KinderundJugendmedien.de

Individual evidence

1. ^ Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize 2002
2. ^ National Book Awards - 2003 - National Book Foundation . Retrieved February 24, 2011.
3. ↑ bookcentre.ca
4. ↑ Kit Alderdice: Q&A with Polly Horvath . In Publisher's Weekly . August 21, 2008.
5. ↑ randomhouse.com
6. ↑ Interview with Polly Horvath . openbookontario.com. October 19, 2011. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
7. ↑ pollyhorvath.com
8. ^ Arnie Keller, Take Control of Getting Started with Dreamweaver . TidBITS, 2006, p. 84.
9. ↑ Barbara Zulandt Kiefer, Susan Ingrid Hepler, Janet Hickman, Charlotte S. Huck: Charlotte Huck's children's literature . McGraw-Hill, Boston 2007, p. 481.
10. ^ Anita Silvey (Ed.): The essential guide to children's books and their creators . Houghton Mifflin Co, Boston 2002, p. 210.
11. ↑ Review excerpt on Perlentaucher.de . April 1, 2005. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
12. ↑ Collective review on Perlentaucher.de . July 31, 2002. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
13. ↑ Guido Graf : Very “Big Holidays”: Polly Horvath writes a lively road movie - This side of Africa . In: Die Welt , July 7, 2007.
14. ^ Sylvia Schwab: Summer happiness and adventure . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur . August 26, 2011. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
15. ↑ Christine Lötscher: Death is a blue valley . Tagesanzeiger.ch, May 31, 2011. Accessed February 24, 2012.
16. ^ "National Book Awards - 1999" . National Book Foundation . Retrieved February 24, 2012
17. ↑ archive.hbook.com
18. ^ Kathleen T. Horning: The Newbery & Caldecott awards: a guide to the medal and honor books . American Library Association, Chicago 2009, p. 27.
19. ↑ us.macmillan.com ( Memento from March 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
20. ↑ Review on quillandquire.com
21. ↑ offered by the translator as part of "Junge weltlesebühne", Berlin, for readings in schools from 12 years of age and in libraries. Content  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.