The story of a Korean maternal grandmother received the highest prestigious children’s literature award in the United States.

Korean-American writer Tay Keller received the Newberry Medal, an American Children’s Literature Award. The American Library Association (ALA) announced on its website on the 25th (local time) that Keller’s feature story, When You Trap a Tiger, has been selected as the 2021 Newberry Medal Winner. ALA announces annual Newberry and Caldecott medal winners, the most prestigious children’s literature award in the United States.

Keller is a writer whose maternal grandmother is Korean. Mother Nora Okja Keller was born to a Korean mother, a German father, and married an American. Growing up in Hawaii, Keller painted what happens when Lily, the protagonist, who lives with her sick grandmother, meets a magical tiger. The tiger, proposing to Lily to return her grandmother’s health, is rooted in a Korean folktale told by Keller’s maternal grandmother.

The jury said, “It is a magical realism masterpiece that evokes love, loss, and hope that Korean traditional fairy tales convey to life.” You will learn,” he said, and translated the Korean’grandmother’ into English.

Keller’s mother is also a novelist. Her mother, Nora Okja Keller, won the American Book Award in 1998 for her novel “Comfort Woman” (1997) about comfort women in the military, and “Fox Girl” with the theme of trauma across generations of comfort women. (2002) was written.

Keller uses her racial identity in her work. In the first children’s literature, The Science of Breakable Things (2018), the same one-quarter of the Korean protagonist was presented as himself, and the protagonist of this award-winning work is mixed. Keller introduced herself, saying, “I write about mixed-race girls looking for voices.”

The Newberry Award was established in 1921 and is awarded annually in honor of John Newberry, an 18th-century book merchant. As a Korean author, Linda Sue Park, an American, received it as “A Single Shard.” This year’s Caldecott Medal, which goes back to the picture book, was awarded by Michaela Goad’s We Are Water Protectors.

Reporter Kim Ho-jeong [email protected]