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Laudatio by María Jesús Gil, President of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Jury

as the president of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Awards Jury, I am very proud to be here with you in Mexico City to introduce the winners of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Awards—Nahoko Uehashi and Roger Mello. As soon as the Jury selected the winners, I informed the patron of the awards, Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, of their decision. Her Majesty has kindly granted me permission to extend her heartiest congratulations to the two winners today. I would like to take this opportunity to warmly thank Her Majesty for her continuing patronage of the Andersen Awards.

I would especially also like to thank Nami Island Inc. for their generous sponsorship of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards. Thank you Mr. Minn, Mrs. Lee, and Mr. Fred Minn for the generous support given by Nami Island Inc. to the Andersen Award, which is the most prestigious international award given to the creators of children’s literature. We are honored, and it is with great pleasure that you can join us today to share this ceremony.

I would also like to express my gratitude to this year’s jury. I had the honor to work with these ten distinguished experts in literature for children from five continents, and it has been an extraordinary experience for me: Anastasia Arkhipova from Russia, Fanuel Hanan Diaz from Venezuela, Sabine Fuchs from Austria, Sang-Wook Kim from South Korea, Enrique Pérez Díaz from Cuba, Deborah Soria from Italy, Susan Stan from USA, Sahar Tarhandeh from Iran, Erik Titusson from Sweden, and Ayfer Gürdal Ünal from Turkey. Former IBBY Vice President Elda Nogueira from Brazil and IBBY Executive Director Liz Page were ex officio jury members.

For almost a year, the members of the jury and I have thoroughly evaluated the work of the twenty-eight authors and thirty illustrators from thirty-three countries who were nominated by the IBBY National Sections as candidates for the 2014 awards. Always, the complete works of the candidates are taken into consideration in the selection process. This represents a year of hard work. As President of this jury, I want to express my gratitude to all of them. And now, in the name of IBBY, it is my privilege and pleasure to briefly introduce you to our 2014 winners, whom we are honoring this evening.

In fact, to summarize in five or six minutes the most important aspects of the work of two talented winners of the stature of Nahoko Uehashi and Roger Mello is really an impossible challenge. However, let me make the attempt. I will do my best.

They are from very distant countries—one from Japan, the other from Brazil—but Nahoko Uehashi’s writing and Roger Mello’s illustrations share a very important viewpoint: through their work, both of them give children and adults the message that we must aim for a better world. They accomplish this by making an everlasting contribution to children’s literature with their work.

And this is the real essence of IBBY and of these awards. We want them to build bridges of understanding and peace between people, promote international understanding through children’s books, and give children everywhere the opportunity to have access to books with high literary and artistic standards.

The winner of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award for writing is Nahoko Uehashi from Japan. Ms. Uehashi writes extraordinary stories of fantasy and science fiction that are replete with imagination, culture, and the beauty of a sophisticated process and form. Her literary subjects are based on ancient Asian and Oceanic mythology and are deeply rooted in the very essence of human nature. Her stories are about honor and duty, fate and sacrifice. She has an extraordinary ability to create worlds in which relationships exist on different planes: worlds seen as network-like universes rather than merely as spaces. In these works, we can find tenderness and a great respect for nature and all sapient creatures. She has a universal message in her books. No matter where we live or...