Anne Sibley O’Brien
Anne Sibley O’Brien
was raised bilingual and bicultural in Seoul, Daegu, and Geoje Island, South Korea, as the daughter of medical missionaries. She attended Mount Holyoke College where she majored in Studio Art, and spent her junior year abroad at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, studying Korean Arts.
She has written and/or illustrated thirty-five picture books, including a graphic novel retelling of The Legend of Hong Kil Dong: The Robin Hood of Korea (Charlesbridge), which won the Global Korea Award, the Aesop Award, and the Asian-Pacific American Award for Literature, and was named to Booklist’s “Top Ten Graphic Novels for Youth 2007.”
As an illustrator, she has enjoyed portraying Korean characters, including Brianna (based on her daughter, Yunhee) in Jamaica & Brianna (HMH) and other titles by Juantia Havill; Sara Mee and her family in What Will You Be, Sara Mee? (Charlesbridge) by Kate Aver Avraham; the protagonist of A Special Day (Bebop Books/Lee & Low); and Jin in I’m New Here.
In 2014, she received the Katahdin Award for lifetime achievement from the Maine Library Association. In the Shadow of the Sun is her first novel.
She has taught beginning Korean at the Korean Language School of Maine, served as the Creative Writing teacher at Camp Sejong Korean cultural camp, and been a featured speaker at the Korea Studies Program, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and at several regional teachers conferences of the National Association of Korean Schools, as well as at various events in South Korea. She is a frequent speaker in classrooms across the country and in international schools around the world.
She lives on Peaks Island in Maine.
She can be found on the web at her website, www.annesibleyobrien.com; her blogs, Coloring Between the Lines, at www.coloringbetweenthelines.com; and on Twitter at @AnneSbleyOBrien.
Read how Anne came to write this novel.