Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar is an American author born in 1954, best known for children's and middle-grade fiction. He first gained a following with the Wayside School series, beginning with Sideways Stories from Wayside School (1978), a surreal collection of stories set in a thirty-story school built by mistake. His novel Holes (1998) became his most celebrated work, winning both the 1998 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 1999 Newbery Medal, and was adapted into a 2003 Disney film for which Sachar wrote the screenplay himself. He has continued to add to the Wayside School series over the decades, most recently with Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom (2020), and has published other novels including Fuzzy Mud (2015) and The Magician of Tiger Castle (2025).