Linda Sue Park

Linda Sue Park was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1960 to Korean immigrant parents. She began writing both stories and poetry at a young age. She has received a BA in English Literature from Stanford University, where she studied writing; a Higher Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College (in Dublin, Ireland); and an MA in Modern British Literature from the University of London. Her first novel, Seesaw Girl, was published in 1999; it is a work of historical fiction for children set in 17th-century Korea. Her third novel, A Single Shard (2001) won the Newbery Award, a prestigious honor for children’s fiction, in 2002. Her most recent novel, Prairie Lotus (2020), centers around a half-Asian girl dealing with racial prejudice in the 19th-century United States. Linda Sue Park has written more than a dozen novels for children, as well as a number of picture books and poems. She currently lives in Rochester, New York.