Sy Montgomery Nabs Children's Book Guild's Nonfiction Award
RSSBy SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 09/24/2009
Author and naturalist Sy Montgomery is winner of the 2010 Children's Book Guild’s Nonfiction Award, which honors an author or illustrator whose body of work has contributed significantly to the quality of nonfiction for kids.
Montgomery, author of Saving the Ghost of the Mountain: An Expedition Among Snow Leopards in Mongolia (2009) and the forthcoming Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot (May, 2010, both Houghton), will receive her award during a celebration at National Geographic in Washington on April 17.
Montgomery, who has written books for adults about female primatologists, man-eating tigers, and the Amazon’s rare pink dolphin, started writing kids’ books after being approached by photographer Nic Bishop. Impressed by Bishop’s photographs, she decided to work with him on a snake book, and the two produced Houghton Mifflin’s award-winning “Scientists in the Field” series, with their first collaboration, The Snake Scientist, published in 1999.
While researching for books, Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire, bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, traveled to Manitoba to see a pit filled with 18,000 red-sided garter snakes, and hiked in Papua New Guinea in search of rare tree kangaroos.
Montgomery, who likes to embed adventure into a narrative so that kids learn about science and feel the excitement of solving a mystery, says she writes old-fashioned adventure stories, except her stories are true.
“I’m writing love stories,” she says, adding that she wants kids to see that their natural love for animals is legitimate and “utterly necessary.”
Montgomery and Bishop waited five years until the endangered birds in Kakapo Rescue finally mated.
