Allen Say (born James Allen Koichi Moriwaki Seii in 1937) is an Asian American author and illustrator best known for his book Grandfather's Journey, a picture book detailing his grandfather's voyage from Japan to the United States and back again, which won the 1994 Caldecott Medal. This story is autobiographical, and relates to Say's constant moving during his childhood. His work mainly focuses on Japanese and Japanese American characters and their stories, and several works have autobiographical elements.
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Allen Say was born in Yokohama, Japan, to a Japanese family: a Japanese American mother and a Korean father who was adopted by British parents and raised in Shanghai.[1] At age 12, four years after his parents' divorce, Say went to live with his grandmother, but received her permission a short time later to live alone. The boy apprenticed himself for many years to his favorite cartoonist, Noro Shinpei, an experience detailed in his autobiographical novel The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice. In time Say came to think of Shinpei as his "spiritual father," as well as a mentor.
When his father decided to move to the United States with his new family, Allan Say was invited to come along. He attended military school for a short time, an experience that was decidedly negative: "I learned bad English from rich juvenile delinquents and developed a lifelong loathing for uniforms and professional soldiers." [2] He was eventually expelled for smoking a cigarette. In the years before becoming a full-time author and illustrator, Say worked as a sign painter and photographer, as well as being drafted into the U.S. Army for a time. While stationed in Germany, his photography was noted and eventually published in the magazine, Stars and Stripes. Upon returning to the United States, he pursued photography as a career choice, but was encouraged to explore his illustrations. He was approached by Houghton Mifflin with a retelling of the Japanese folktake, "The Boy of the Three-Year Nap."
In 1994, fellow children's author Lois Lowry mentioned Say in her Newbery Award acceptance speech for The Giver,[3] having discovered the day of the ceremony that in childhood, both authors lived in the same Japanese town, Shibuya. The two authors spoke for the first time when each autographed a book for the other and she signed hers in Japanese.[4]
A good story should alter you in some way; it should change your thinking, your feeling, your psyche, or the way you look at things. A story is an abstract experience; it's rather like venturing through a maze. When you come out of it, you should feel slightly changed.