Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar was born in East Meadow, New York, and moved with his family to Orange County, California, when he was nine. At the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied economics, he worked as a teacher's aide at an elementary school. The children there gave him the idea for Sideways Stories from Wayside School (1978), his first book.

He went on to law school and worked part time as a lawyer while he wrote. By 1989 his children's books sold well enough that he could write full time.

Holes (1998) follows Stanley Yelnats, a boy wrongly sent to a desert detention camp where the inmates must dig a hole every day. The novel weaves his story together with a family curse and a love story from a century before. It argues that small acts of kindness and courage can undo an old wrong. It won both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award, and he wrote the screenplay for the 2003 film. He lives in Austin, Texas.