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I am honoured to join education innovators like Ms. Vicky Colbert, Dr. Madhav Chavan, and Sir Fazle Hasan Abed as the fourth WISE Prize for Education Laureate. I accept this prize on behalf of the million girls Camfed is committed to supporting through secondary education.

I am a great admirer of most of the judges in Britain.

The best thing about being Children's Laureate has definitely been all the children and teens I've met.

I loved being a judge, and sometimes I miss the power of the gavel, but this is a lot more fun.

There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.

I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career.

I was privileged to serve as a judge.

I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!