PEN Literary Awards Festival: Meeting Matthew Kirby, author of Icefall

In my September 5th post I wrote about Icefall, by Matthew Kirby, winner of the PEN award for Children's/Young Adult Literature.  On Monday, October 22nd, I attended the awards dinner and had the honor of meeting Matthew Kirby in person, who had flown to Los Angeles from his home in Idaho to accept the award. He told me that the germ of the idea for the book came in a dream, then followed by an enormous amount of research into Viking life in Norway. You can read about PEN and the Awards Festival held on October 22nd at the Beverly Hills Hotel at the INK blog in the October 24th post by Gretchen Woelfle, finalist for her book All the World's a Stage: A Novel in Five Acts.