International Youth Library Fellowship: Congratulations to Dr Lucy Stone

Congratulations to Dr Lucy Stone who has been awarded a 2026 International Youth Library Fellowship, funded by the Bavarian Ministry for Science and Arts.

The International Youth Library in Munich first opened in 1949, thanks to stalwart efforts of Jella Lepman, a Jewish writer and journalist who recognised the vital role of world literature in supporting the recovery of children and teenagers and to foster cross-cultural, democratic and peaceful thinking. The collection has grown substantially over the years, and the Library offers a rich programme of events, with key values of international understanding and cross-cultural dialogue at its core, and a fellowship programme open to scholars and authors across the globe to study and exchange knowledge about the collection. (You can read more about the Library and related initiatives in this blog by Dr Jennifer Mooney, Programme Chair of the DCU MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature.) 

Lucy will be using her fellowship to advance her research on health(care) and children’s and young adult literature, with a focus on the ways in which young cancer survivors are portrayed in fiction across the globe. This work is part of a larger project that aims to explore the potential use of fiction in interventions to support the education and psychosocial needs of young survivors, and to identify the sorts of narratives that young survivors themselves wish and need to tell and read. 

Lucy is not the first scholar from DCU to take up a fellowship at the International Youth Library, and follows in the footsteps of Dr Áine McGillicuddy and Valerie Coghlan. Valerie’s work at the International Youth Library focused on controversial picturebooks, while Áine did a comparative study of English, French and German children’s books on the treatment of exile in the era of the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War. These projects led to key publications in the fields of children’s literature and exile studies and enriched teaching offerings of the MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. More information about the MA can be found on this webpage, and there’s still time to sign up for the postgrad open day on 27 November via the recruitment office website.