The Giver (The Giver #1)

Lois Lowry, author of over thirty novels and twice winner of the Newbery Medal (for The Giver and Number the Stars), was born on the 20th of March 1937 in Hawaii. Her father was an Army dentist and the family lived all over the world. She went to Brown University, but left to get married and a raise a family of four children. She settled in Maine, where she returned to college and received her degree from the University of Southern Maine. She fulfilled a childhood dream when she started writing in the 1970s. In her books, Lois throws her characters and readers into many thought-provoking situations. She explains that she measures her success as an author by her ability to "help adolescents answer their own questions about life, identity and human relationships." Long divorced, and now a grandmother of four, today she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her partner, Martin Small, and their Tibetan terrier, Alfie, and spends weekends in their nineteenth-century farmhouse in Maine.