Kate DiCamillo
Kate DiCamillo (born March 25, 1964, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American author whose award-winning children’s books commonly confront themes of loss but whose protagonists—who range from a lonely girl in Florida to a lost porcelain rabbit—find redemption and joy in figuring out life’s meaning. She won a Newbery Medal in 2004 for The Tale of Despereaux (2003) and another in 2014 for Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (2013).
As a child, DiCamillo suffered from chronic pneumonia, a condition that prompted her mother, a teacher, and elder brother to move with her to Florida when she was five. Her father never joined the family in Florida, a rejection that profoundly shaped her childhood and adult life. “I was a really, really sick kid.…I had a mother who read to me and took me to the library and my father left his family. All of that is part of why I became a writer,” DiCamillo told Encyclopædia Britannica in 2022. “I was writing into the absence.” She majored in English at the University of Florida at Gainesville (B.A., 1987), where a professor told her she should go to graduate school because she had “a facility with words.” Instead, “I decided I could be a writer without graduate school.” In 1994 she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked in a book warehouse and became drawn to children’s fiction. Her first novel, Because of Winn-Dixie (2000; film 2005), was published after a young editor spotted it in the “slush pile,” a publishing house’s collection of manuscripts sent unsolicited by aspiring authors. The novel—which tells the story of 10-year-old India Opal Buloni, a girl coping with the loss of her mother and her arrival in a new town, and the mangy dog she finds in a supermarket—was praised for its gentle humour, the clarity of its writing, and the endearing nature of its young protagonist. It was named a Newbery Honor Book. DiCamillo described Winn-Dixie as “the golden doorway to the rest of it; without that book, the other stories don’t happen.”
In DiCamillo’s second novel, Tiger Rising (2001; film 2022), she again explored the life of a child beset by the loss of a parent. In it, two friends discover in the woods a caged tiger, and DiCamillo interspersed lines from William Blake’s “The Tyger” to help drive the narrative. The award-winning The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread (2003; film 2008), DiCamillo’s third novel, is the story of a nonconformist mouse who falls in love with the princess of the castle in which his family lives. Her other novels include The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (2006), which features a conceited china rabbit that learns how to love through tragedy, and The Magician’s Elephant (2009), about an orphan whose quest to find his missing sister involves an elephant. Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (2013; film 2021), which concerns the adventures of a cynical young comic-book lover and a squirrel endowed with human abilities, won the 2014 Newbery Medal. DiCamillo also drew praise for Raymie Nightingale (2016), which centres on a young girl who, in an effort to get her adulterous father to return home, hopes to win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition. Other characters in the book include Louisiana Elefante, whose struggles after moving away from her friends were chronicled in Louisiana’s Way Home (2018), and Beverly, who finds herself after leaving home in Beverly, Right Here (2019). DiCamillo later published The Beatryce Prophecy (2021), a fairy tale about a young girl who is reportedly destined to unseat a king.
DiCamillo credits her ability to create characters whose lives revolve around places as exotic as castles and as quotidian as grocery stores to her ability to remember herself as a child. “I’ve learned to be an adult, but that part of me who was a kid is always there. It’s who I want to touch and who I want to write for.” She says that sometimes adults forget “how fully alive you are in the world when you are a kid.…Kids are brave enough to think big thoughts; you need to respect that.”
In addition to her novels, DiCamillo also wrote several successful series of chapter books. The first series began with Mercy Watson to the Rescue (2005) and follows the adventures of the exuberant toast-loving pig Mercy Watson. Later books in the series include Mercy Watson Goes for a Ride (2006), Mercy Watson Fights Crime (2006), Mercy Watson: Princess in Disguise (2007), Mercy Watson Thinks like a Pig (2008), and Mercy Watson: Something Wonky This Way Comes (2009). Characters from these works later appeared in the Tales from Deckawoo Lane series, which includes Leroy Ninker Saddles Up (2014), Eugenia Lincoln and the Unexpected Package (2017), and Stella Endicott and the Anything-Is-Possible Poem (2020). DiCamillo also published picture books, including La La La (2017). She was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress in 2014.
Several of her books have been turned into movies, and in 2022 The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane was adapted as an opera performed by the Minnesota Opera. DiCamillo described being moved by the part of the libretto where the long-lost Edward approaches a house with warm lights glowing inside. “It’s a beautiful adaptation, and they sing over and over ‘You have found a home here.’ and that’s what kids are trying to do: to find their place in the world. That’s the theme again and again.”