It took Jonathan Auxier (’03) a while before he figured out that writing children’s fiction was his thing. “I was a late bloomer,” says the 2014 Governor General Award finalist for children’s literature. “I always loved telling stories and I spent a lot of years figuring out how to tell stories and also which medium fit me best.”
Auxier—who lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with his wife and three daughters, published his first novel,Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes, in 2011. He followed it up with The Night Gardener, which won the 2015 TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, as well as the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy. In May 2015, Disney bought the film rights to the book .
Due in stores internationally in April 2016, Auxier’s third book, Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard is the story of a 12-year-old bookmender who dreams of escaping the confines of her dull life. When some mysterious people appear in her shop with a very unusual book to repair, she is thrust into her own adventure—one that is greater than anything she’s ever read.
The challenge, for Auxier, was to dive deep into the themes at the core of the story. “Because Sophie Quire is a book story about a book mender who finds a magic book,” he says, “it’s very easy to make it on a surface-level a sort of pandering celebration of the whimsy and magic of story books. But I really wanted to take that idea and push it further, which proved to be extremely difficult because the importance of stories is a very difficult thing to articulate or quantify.”
As Peter Nimble was created to explore the concept of justice, Sophie Quire became a vehicle for Auxier to study what happens when we engage with stories—and what happens if we discard them.
“I believe in my core that stories are valuable,” he continues. “They don’t fill an empty stomach, they don’t suture a bleeding wound, they don’t seem to have any discernable and direct impact on the physical world—yet I know at my core that what transpires between an author and a reader is almost mystical in its significance.”