'Dal Shabet' Baek Heena Boston Globe Hornbook Award Honorary Mention

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Picture book author Baek Heena (51) has been honored with an international award after two years. According to major U.S. media on the 22nd (local time), she received an honorary award in the picture book category at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for her second original fairy tale, "Dal Shabet" (English version: Moon Pops). Baek, famous as the author of "Cloud Bread," was the first Korean to win the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world's largest children's literature award, in 2020.

The Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards also boast considerable prestige. Since 1967, they have awarded main and honorary prizes in three categories: picture books, fiction/poetry, and nonfiction. Another Korean author who previously won is Lee Suji, who received an honorary award in 2013 for illustrating the text "Open This Little Book" by American author Jesse Klausmeier. Baek is the first to receive this award for a book whose original copyright is held by a domestic publisher (Chaek Ilneun Gom).

Published in 2010, "Dal Shabet" tells the story of making sherbet from a melting moon on a hot summer night. The setting is an apartment complex experiencing a blackout due to excessive electricity use. The neighborhood grandmother makes sherbet from the melted moon water to help the residents forget the heat. The moon rabbits, who lost their home when the moon disappeared, are cared for by the grandmother, who pours the remaining moon water into flowerpots to bloom evening primroses and recreates the moon.

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The grandmother’s ingenious idea stimulates children’s imagination while reminding them of the earth’s preciousness and the importance of the environment. Baek said she conceived the story while watching the tightly closed apartment windows and car doors on a hot summer day. Worried that the more air conditioners ran, the higher the outside temperature would rise, she imagined what would happen if the moon melted. In her "Author’s Note," she wrote, "I hope children enjoy reading it," and "I hope it makes us think about the earth we live on even just once more."

Baek studied Educational Technology at Ewha Womans University and Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. She gained recognition in 2005 as the "Author of the Year" in the fiction category at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair with "Cloud Bread." Her other notable works include "The Fairy at the Long-Life Bathhouse," "Al Candy," "The Old Woman and the Tiger," "The Boy Who Went to Find the North Wind," "Pink String," and "Yeoni and Budle Doreng."

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