Current Winners
 
The Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation announced that The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett has been selected by a panel of judges to receive the Anne Spencer Lindbergh Prize for the best children's fantasy novel published in the English language in 2003-2004. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, published The Wee Free Men. A $5,000 award will be presented to the author of this outstanding book.
The Anne Spencer Lindbergh Prize in Children's Literature, awarded biennially, was established in 1996 in her honor by the Lindbergh Foundation. The winners are chosen by a panel of writers, editors, librarians and others prominent in the field. The prize continues Anne Spencer Lindbergh's literary tradition of placing ordinary children in extraordinary situations, which then play out in amusing and telling ways. In conferring this award, friends and colleagues join together to celebrate Anne's life and art, and the grace and wit epitomized in both, as well as to reward and encourage the best in fantasy writing for children.
Judges in the Anne Spencer Lindbergh Prize competition are Susan Kenney, Charles A. Dana Professor of Creative Writing at Colby College, Waterville, Maine; and Faith Williams, Children's Librarian at the Southeast Branch of the D.C. Public Library in Washington, D.C.
The judges' citation for The Wee Free Men reads: "Young witch-to-be Tiffany Aching is a sensible, stubborn and energetic nine-year-old working as a dairy maid on the family farm when she teams up with the Nac Mac Fleegle, a clan of six-inch-high blue men, to rescue her baby brother and ward off a sinister invasion from Fairyland into her beloved Chalk. Remembering her Granny Aching (who, she discovers, was also 'slightly a witch'), her tobacco, her wise ways, and her magical shepherding hut, gives Tiffany strength. So does her friendship with the tiny comical brawling and stealing painted Pictsies who help her fight her way past story book monsters, headless horseman and illusory blizzards to confront and ultimately vanquish the evil Fairy Queen herself. This year's winner turns the old fashioned fairy tale upside down in a marvelously conceived saga, featuring sly wit and laugh-aloud humor as well as wisdom."
The Wee Free Men was chosen from 70 eligible entries in the 2003-2004 cycle of the Anne Spencer Lindbergh Prize program. In honor of Anne Spencer Lindbergh, the Foundation will donate the books it received as entries in this Prize program to The Five Owls, a publication for readers personally and professionally involved with children's literature, which will in turn donate them to local libraries and literary organizations who then give them to children. The judges in the contest will donate their books to the D.C. Public Library in Washington, D.C.
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