Remembering Paula Fox

> The beloved author, famed for The Slave Dancer many others, was admired for her candid writing

wrote screenplays and taught English. After he divorced Elsie, he had three sons and a daughter with his second wife, Mary. Her life zigged and zagged, from being brought up in the United States and Cuba by family, friends and a small-town preacher, then reclaimed by her parents. At 16, she left to follow her own path. Fox attended Columbia University and married Richard Sigerson, by whom she had two sons. She later married literary critic and translator Martin Greenberg, and worked for years as a teacher and tutor for troubled children. Only in her 40s did she begin her first novel, Poor George, about a cynical schoolteacher who finds purpose and ruin in mentoring a vagrant teenager. She briefly studied at New York’s prestigious Julliard School for musicians and worked as a journalist. She thrived at writing for decades.

For her contributions as a children’s writer, she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, the highest international recognition for a creator of children’s books.

She also won several awards for particular children’s books, including the 1974 Newbery Medal for her novel The Slave Dancer; a 1983 National Book Award in category Children’s Fiction (paperback) for A Place Apart; and the 2008 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for Portrait of Ivan (1969) in its German-language edition, Ein Bild von Ivan.

In 2011, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, a project of the Empire State Centre for the Book. Her adult novels went out of print in 1992.

In the mid 90s, she enjoyed a revival as her adult fiction was championed by a new generation of American writers.

Fox is survived by her husband, two children and several grandchildren, including rock star-actress Courtney Love, 52. – Agencies

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