M. T. Anderson Nabs National Book Award

By Staff -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2006

M. T. Anderson, author of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party, is this year’s National Book Award winner for young people’s literature. He beat four other finalists.

Anderson’s no stranger to the limelight—his satirical sci-fi story Feed (both Candlewick) was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best young adult novel of the year.

The Pox Party, set during the Revolutionary War, tells the story of the young son of an African slave. Octavian is the subject of a scientific study in Boston, just before the start of the war. The first part of the novel is narrated in the boy’s highly educated, rational voice. But after Octavian loses his voice 220 pages into the book, the story continues through letters written by those who knew him. The book explores the issue of slavery and what it means to be a patriot and a loyalist.

In his acceptance speech, the 38-year-old Anderson, whose initials stand for Matthew Tobin, joked that Candlewick showed “incredibly poor judgment” by agreeing to publish his rather unorthodox and lengthy (900 page) two-volume historical novel. Children’s publishers tend to say no to such a proposal, he said. Anderson also praised the judges for making Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese (First Second/Roaring Brook), a finalist because “there’s a lot of dithering that goes on in the blogosphere as to whether graphic novels are literature. I’m really glad [the judges] are leading this charge.”