This year’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence goes to two bookworms, Amanda Peters and Roxanna Asgarian. The American Library Association presented the awards to them, with a $5,000 top-up in cash as they await to attend the ALA annual conference for the honoring session. The conference will be in San Diego.
2012 saw the birth of the Carnegie Medals, with the aid of a grant provided and sustained by New York’s Carnegie Corporation. The previous winners of the medal are James McBride, Bryan Stevenson, and Jennifer Egan.
This year, the award goes to two authors who coincidentally share a story of being in love with books and libraries in general, Amanda Peters and Roxanna Asgarian.
Amanda Peters Story and What She Had to Say
Amanda is from Falmouth, Nova Scotia. Her passion for the library led her to take a course in library and information studies up to the master’s level at Dalhousie University. She is currently an associate professor at Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia.
The novel, “The Berry Pickers” won Amanda the fiction medal. The novel spans different generations and tells the story of a Mi’kmaq girl who disappeared from a blueberry field situated in Maine.
During her interview after winning the awards, Amanda recalled how she was moved by John Steinbeck’s novel, “Of Mice and Men.” The book tells the story of two foreign workers who ended up overwhelmed by tragedies. The story made her cry and changed her reading career’s trajectory completely.
Roxanna Asgarian’s Story and What She Had to Say
For Roxanna Asgarian, having more access to books and less access to TV is what made her a bookworm and a library lover. She tells the story of how her mom limited her access to the TV and specified the shows she could and could not watch. However, Roxanna’s mom let her run free in the library and choose the books she wanted to read.
Roxanna Asgarian developed an obsession with Dahl’s books. She read each of them progressively. She had this to say, “… I think when it comes to books and readings you have to be able to find what’s interesting to you and pursue that. It helps you come to a love of reading.”
Asgarian’s novel, “We Were Once A Family: Love, Death, and Child Removal in America,” got her a medal under the nonfiction category. The novel looks into the Hart family murder-suicide case of 2018 in which the couple decided to drive off a cliff despite their six adopted children being in the back of the car.