Laurie Halse Anderson

Onondaga Community College and Georgetown

Back in New York she enrolled at Onondaga Community College and paid her way in part by milking cows on a dairy farm in Marcellus. She finished an associate degree there in 1981, then transferred to Georgetown University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in languages and linguistics in 1984.

She married Gregory H. Anderson in 1983. The couple had two daughters before they divorced. In 2005 she married Scot Larrabee, a childhood friend she had reconnected with, and the two households became a blended family of four children. By 2019, TIME reported, she had six grandchildren.

Speak, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Her first novel for teenagers came out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1999. Speak was a finalist for the National Book Award that year and won a Printz Honor. In the foreword to a later anniversary edition she called it "the book I wasn't going to write."

Asked about it by PopMatters in 2010, she said: "Looking back, I think I wrote Speak for my daughters, and I know I wrote it for myself." In the same interview she pushed back on the way the book was usually summarized, saying Speak "is not about rape," and she mentioned that she had "dealt with depression my entire life, on and off."

The novel reached a wider audience in 2004 as a film starring Kristen Stewart, and again in 2018 as a graphic novel illustrated by Emily Carroll. TIME put its sales at more than 3 million copies in 2019, twenty years after publication.

Fever 1793 and Chains

Anderson moved between contemporary novels and history from the start. Fever 1793, a historical novel, came out from Simon & Schuster in 2000. Catalyst (2002), Prom (2005), and Twisted (2007) followed from Viking. Chains, a novel of the Revolutionary War published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, was a National Book Award finalist, made the Carnegie Medal shortlist, and won the 2009 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

She continued that story in Forge (2010) and Ashes (2016). In the same years she published two more contemporary novels for teenagers, Wintergirls (2009) and The Impossible Knife of Memory (2014).

In January 2009 the American Library Association gave her the Margaret A. Edwards Award, which recognizes a writer's lasting contribution to young adult readers, for Catalyst, Fever 1793, and Speak. The award came with $2,000. The committee chair, David Mowery, said she "masterfully gives voice to teen characters."

Missouri, 2010, and the ALA Challenged List

The book that won her the most readers also drew the most attempts to pull it from schools. In 2010 a man in Missouri tried to have Speak removed from local schools, calling it "soft pornography." Judy Blume was among those who defended the book. Anderson told PopMatters that year that "Censorship protects adults who feel inadequate."

The challenges did not stop. The American Library Association placed Speak fourth on its list of the most challenged books of 2020, citing complaints about its political viewpoint, claims that it was biased against male students, its depiction of rape, and profanity. In Stockholm in 2023 she told the audience that the United States was seeing "a never-before-seen level of censorship in children's literature," and that censors "usually ban my novel Speak."

Shout, 2019

TIME's 2019 profile of Anderson ran under the headline "She Spent 20 Years Teaching Teens About Sexual Assault. Now She's Sharing Her Own Story." It reported that she was raped at 13, that she had told a student about it, and that she wrote about the assault in Shout, published in 2019, twenty years after Speak.

Five Million Kronor in Stockholm

In March 2023 the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award named her its laureate. The award carries five million Swedish kronor, which Publishers Weekly put at more than $475,000 at the exchange rate of the day. The jury wrote that "Laurie Halse Anderson gives voice to the search for meaning, identity, and truth," and praised her "darkly radiant realism."

That prize is one of the few figures about her income on the public record. Her publisher, Penguin Random House, and the National Book Foundation both say her books have sold more than eight million copies combined. No advance, royalty rate, or film-rights fee has been reported in any source we found, so FamousBio does not publish a net worth estimate for her.

Rebellion 1776 and a 65th Birthday

Her most recent book, Rebellion 1776, came out on April 1, 2025, from Atheneum/Dlouhy. It is historical fiction for middle-grade readers. She told Publishers Weekly that "the past doesn't hold all the answers, but understanding it can help prepare them to navigate the future." Asked what came next, she said a contemporary young adult novel was likely, but that it was "still much too early to say anything more." She turns 65 on the day this article was published.

Sources

• Laurie Anderson | Pennsylvania Center for the Book
• Anderson, Laurie Halse 1961- | Encyclopedia.com
• Stories of Inspiration - Laurie Halse Anderson, '81
• Laurie Halse Anderson
• Laurie Halse Anderson's Acceptance Speech
• Bologna 2023: Laurie Halse Anderson Wins Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award
• Q & A with Laurie Halse Anderson
• She Spent 20 Years Teaching Teens About Sexual Assault. Now She's Sharing Her Own Story
• Speak Loudly: Laurie Halse Anderson on Book Banning » PopMatters
• Laurie Halse Anderson wins 2009 Edwards Award for significant and lasting contribution to young adult readers for "Catalyst"; "Fever 1793"; and "Speak"
• Most Challenged Books | Banned Books
• Laurie Halse Anderson | Penguin Random House
• Laurie Halse Anderson - National Book Foundation