Festival Staff / January 28, 2013
Tucson Festival of Books was delighted to welcome R. L. Stine back to the 2013 Festival as a presenting author. Stine was presented with this year's TFOB Founders Award, which recognizes the lifetime achievement of an outstanding Festival participant. Elmore Leonard received the first award in 2011 and Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana were honored last year.
Robert Lawrence Stine, better known as R. L. Stine, began his writing career when he was just nine years old and today has achieved the position of one of the bestselling children's authors in history. The number of books his mostly middle-grade and young adult readers have enjoyed (albeit with appropriate nail-biting) is nothing short of staggering. Stine's books have sold well over 400 million copies worldwide!
During the 1990s, Stine was listed on People Weekly's "Most Intriguing People" list, and in 2003, the Guinness Book of World Records named Stine as the best-selling children's book series author of all time. He won the Thriller Writers of America Silver Bullet Award in 2007 and for three consecutive years USA Today named Stine as America's number one bestselling author.
Not surprisingly, Stine has long had a fascination with words, graphic images and humor. "I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!"
Stine, who has been called the "Stephen King of children's literature," is the author of hundreds of horror fiction novels, including the books in the Fear Street, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, and The Nightmare Room series. Some of his other works include a Space Cadets trilogy, two Hark game books, and dozens of joke books under the pen name Jovial Bob Stine.
The extraordinarily popular and prolific Goosebumps series (sixty-two books were published under the Goosebumps umbrella title from 1992 to 1997) has spawned numerous offshoots, iterations and merchandise. And don't think your children get to have all the goosebumps. Stine has also written several adult novels, including "Superstitious" (1995) and "Red Rain" (2012).
