Jean Van Leeuwen wrote 20 Oliver and Amanda Pig books, and lots of different titles aimed toward younger audiences.
Ann Schweninger/Penguin Random Home
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Ann Schweninger/Penguin Random Home
Kids’s ebook writer Jean Van Leeuwen has died. The award-winning author was greatest identified for her sprightly tales starring such anthropomorphic characters as sibling pigs and a gang of mice. She died on Mar. 3 at her house in Chappaqua, N.Y. on the age of 87.
Van Leeuwen’s daughter, Elizabeth Gavril, instructed NPR the trigger was most cancers and mentioned the household had taken its time to share the information in regards to the writer’s loss of life.
Revealed by Penguin Random House, Van Leeuwen’s 20-book collection featured pig siblings Oliver and Amanda. Amanda Pig and the Actually Scorching Day, illustrated by Anne Schweninger, received the 2006 American Library Affiliation’s Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for essentially the most distinguished ebook for starting readers. The ebook describes how Amanda will get by a tricky day of hovering temperatures with the assistance of hose sprinkling and lemonade consuming. In Tales of Oliver Pig, illustrated by Arnold Lobel, Oliver and Amanda bake oatmeal cookies with their mother on a chilly, moist day, amongst different actions.
Creator Jean Van Leeuwen in 2018.
David Gavril
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David Gavril
“Once we have been younger, we gave her many story concepts apparently,” mentioned Gavril of her mother in an interview with NPR on Saturday. “Numerous the Oliver and Amanda Pig books are based mostly on experiences that my brother David and I went by as kids.”
Galvin factors to a Tales of Amanda Pig story titled “Amanda’s egg.” “Amanda does not like eggs and he or she simply sits on the desk and he or she stares at her egg and he or she will not eat it,” mentioned Gavril of what occurs within the story. “And her father pig goes out into the yard and does his work, and Oliver Pig goes out to play and mom Pig goes off and no matter, and Amanda Pig simply sits there and stares at her egg. And that is actually a real story.”
Van Leeuwen wrote practically 60 books. They have been translated into a number of languages and a few titles offered tens of millions of copies, in line with The New York Times. One among them, The Nice Cheese Conspiracy, which launched younger readers to a renegade mouse named Marvin the Magnificent and his buddies, was tailored in 1986 right into a Czech animated film.
“She was a clever, humorous, and fantastic author,” wrote kids’s ebook writer Roni Schotter in an e mail of remembrances forwarded to NPR.
Van Leeuwen was born in Glenridge, N.J., and grew up in close by Rutherford, the daughter of a minister father and college instructor mom. At Syracuse College, she majored in journal journalism and took a job at T.V. Information in New York Metropolis after graduating in 1959. She labored as a kids’s ebook editor for a couple of decade for Random Home, Viking Press and Dial Books. Gavril mentioned her mom began writing books on the aspect, and continued to take action after she left her publishing profession to boost her two kids.
“ We have been on this little house in New York Metropolis and he or she used to jot down throughout our nap occasions,” Gavril mentioned. “She would simply run the dishwasher again and again to drown out my brother’s speaking or no matter.”
Jean Van Leeuwen additionally wrote books for older kids, together with historic fiction.
James Watling/Puffin Books
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James Watling/Puffin Books
After the household moved to New York’s suburban Westchester County in 1977, Gavril mentioned her mother had extra time to herself and would write constantly within the mornings, and typically additionally within the afternoons. She did not solely write image books for very younger kids. Her output included fiction for center graders and younger adults. One fashionable title for older kids is Certain for Oregon, a fictionalized model of the journey made by 9-year-old Mary Ellen Todd and her household over the Oregon Path in 1852, with illustrations by James Watling.
As a former kids’s ebook editor, the writer was aware of her craft.
“The problem of writing an easy-to-read ebook, with its strict limits of size and vocabulary, is to inform a narrative that’s easy however not strange,” Van Leeuwen wrote in 1987 in The New York Times Book Review.
Van Leeuwen did not give many interviews and most well-liked not to attract an excessive amount of consideration to herself. “Jean was so modest about her writing,” kids’s writer and illustrator Marisabina Russo, who was in an authors’ group with Van Leeuwen, wrote in an e mail. “She by no means volunteered to be the primary in our group to share her newest draft.”
But she was community-minded. In her older years, Van Leeuwen spent greater than 20 years volunteering at Douglas Grafflin Elementary College in Chappaqua, in line with her daughter.
In accordance with a 2015 article in native publication The Inside Press, the scholars received to know the writer annually as “neighborhood volunteer Mrs. Gavril,” solely to later be taught they’d been working with the writer of their beloved Oliver and Amanda Pig books the entire time.
