Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for May 19, 2026

 This writer, born in a Scandinavian slum in 1805, grew up with a mother who never learned to read but remembered dozens of old folk tales. When his father died, the young son son had to go to work, as a weaver, a tailor and in a tobacco factory. He had a beautiful singing voice and he moved to the big city hoping to find work on stage, but then his voice changed, and he decided to become a poet. He had no luck selling his work until he began to publish the tales his mother used to tell him, and he's been called the father of the modern fairy tale. This is Hans Christian Andersen, who died in 1875 mourned by the whole world.

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for May 5th, 2026

This author was born in 1849 in England but moved to live with relatives in the US after her father died. She wrote magazine articles in her teens to support her mother and siblings. She shocked Victorian society by wearing her hair loose, making more money than some male writers, buying herself a house and divorcing two husbands. When her 16-year-old son died in her arms of tuberculosis, she fell into depression but was helped by writing about a dying garden brought back to life, which mirrored her own journey through grief. This is Frances Hodgson Burnett and her novel was The Secret Garden, published in 1911.