{"id":609102,"date":"2026-04-17T00:21:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T00:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/609102\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T00:21:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T00:21:21","slug":"winnipeg-born-author-jon-klassen-wins-nearly-750k-swedish-prize-for-childrens-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/609102\/","title":{"rendered":"Winnipeg-born author Jon Klassen wins nearly $750K Swedish prize for children’s literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jon Klassen, the Winnipeg-born children’s book author and illustrator of I Want My Hat Back, has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is worth nearly $750,000.<\/p>\n

The award, administered by the Swedish Arts Council, is handed out annually to a person or organization for their contribution to children’s and young adult literature.<\/p>\n

Jurors praised Klassen’s body of work as a “subtle, astute and humorous investigation into existential questions.”<\/p>\n

His books include I Want My Hat Back, the tale of a bear searching for his missing pointy red hat<\/a>, along with This Is Not My Hat, which follows a tiny fish wearing a bowler hat and the much bigger fish he stole it from, We Found a Hat, about two turtles who find a cowboy hat they both want, and the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning Cats’ Night Out.<\/p>\n

He was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2018 for “his transformative contributions to children’s literature.” <\/p>\n

Klassen, who now lives in Los Angeles, is the first Canadian laureate of the prize.<\/p>\n

The award was founded by the Swedish government in 2002, and is worth five million kronor, which is roughly $744,000 Cdn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 2 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-609102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}