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  • Elizabeth LairdAuthor – United Kingdom
  • Monica Hagnevik

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I think we should encourage children to look at the difficult stuff.

E. Laird

elizabeth laird grew up in Britain after moving from New Zealand as a child. She later lived in the Middle East, Africa, and India before settling down with her husband in Britain. She has worked in education, first as a teacher’s aide in Malaysia and later as a trained teacher in both Ethiopia and Britain. However, she has been a writer since she was a child, and today, she is a full-time writer of mainly children’s books.

It was her time in Ethiopia that would lead her to write specifically for children. She fell in love with Ethiopia while teaching, and some of her first publications were collections of Ethiopian stories. She wrote them for her Ethiopian students because there were few reading materials available to them. Thirty years later, this love affair with Ethiopia would lead Laird to head the Ethiopian Story Project from 1997 to 2001. Through the project, she helped collect, translate, and publish folk stories from each of the different ethnic groups living in Ethiopia.

Many of Laird’s stories tackle hard or controversial subjects that many feel should not be included in books written for children. Some of these subjects include disability, poverty, war, and oppression. Her first critically acclaimed book, Red Sky in the Morning (1988), deals with Laird’s personal experiences growing up with a severely disabled younger brother. The Garbage King (2003) relates the lives of two runaways who must learn to survive on the streets of Addis Ababa. In Kiss the Dust (1991), she tells the story of a Kurdish family’s flight from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And, in probably her most controversial book, A Little Piece of Land (2003), Laird offers an insight into the conflict between Israel and Palestine through the eyes of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy. Laird believes that her stories have the ability to instill compassion and understanding in children towards others who are subject to prejudice because of ignorance.

Despite writing about children in controversial situations, Elizabeth Laird’s books have won critical acclaim. She has also accumulated many literary awards and honors including being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal five times (1996, 2001, 2003, 2007, and 2014).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Garbage King. London: Macmillan, 2003. Print.
Kiss the Dust. Heinemann, 1991. Print.
A Little Piece of Ground. London: Macmillan, 2003. Print.
The Ogress & the Snake: Tales from Somalia. London: Frances Lincoln, 2009. Print.
Red Sky in the Morning. Heinemann, 1998. Print. [End Page 60]
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