Lovely Lists: Bath's Own Children's Authors and Illustrators

Here's the start of an interesting list: children's authors and illustrators who have some association with Bath ... if you can think of anyone else, just let me know or add to the Comments box.

Allan Ahlberg who, together with his illustrator wife Janet created Peepo!, Burglar Bill, Each Peach Pear Plum and many other classic children's books, lives in Bath. Born in Croydon, Allan was brought up in Oldbury in the West Midlands.  He writes from a shed in the back garden of his town-house. Janet Ahlberg died in 1994, sadly aged only 50.

David Almond was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2012. He's a prize winning children's author, perhaps best known for Skellig and My Name is Mina (which we read in January 2012).

Grahame Baker-Smith won the 2011 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for his illustrations for FArTHER.  Born and raised in Oxfordshire, he lives in Camden in Bath.

Elen Caldecott graduated with an MA in Writing for Young People from Bath Spa University and now lives in Bristol. She was shortlisted for the 2009 Waterstones' Children's Book of the Year. Operation Eiffel Tower was shortlisted for the Red House Children’s Book Award 2013.

Jim Carrington, a Carnegie nominee for Inside My Head, was born in Norwich and studied at Bath Spa University.

Under her maiden name Sheila Chapman, Sheila Jeffries wrote four children's novels in the popular 'pony story' genre. Sheila studied at Bath Academy of Art and began to write full time in 1982 under the name Sheila Haigh.

Tracey Corderoy moved to Bath from South Wales when she was eighteen to study at Bath College of Higher Education. Her books include the Willow Valley series and Whizz Pop, Granny STOP!

Nicola Davies / Stevie Morgan trained as a zoologist and worked for the BBC before becoming an author. What’s Eating You was shortlisted for the American Association for the Advancement of Science children’s book prize for 2008. Nicola is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University. 

Kim Donovan studied for her MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. She is the author of St Viper’s School for Super Villains.

Sam Gayton moved to Bath aged 26 to take the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University.  He worked as a teaching assistant at Widcombe Junior School and launched his debut novel, The Snow Merchant, at the Bath Children's Literature Festival in 2011.

Che Golden spent her childhood between County Cork and London.  She is a graduate of Bath Spa University's creative writing course.  Her first novel was The Feral Child, in 2012.

Julia Green, author of Blue Moon and Baby Blue, is a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University.

Sarah Hammond studied for her MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. The Night Sky in my Head was shortlisted for the Calderdale Children’s Book of the Year Award 2013 and the Leeds Book Award 2013.

Candida Harper (C J Harper) is another graduate from Bath Spa University's MA in Writing for Young People.  Her first book is The Disappeared, published in January 2013.

 

Marie-Louise Jensen went to school in Bradford-on-Avon.  She studied for her MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University.  She was shortlisted for the 2009 Waterstones' Children's Book of the Year.

Dick King-Smith (1922-2011) taught at Farmborough primary school near Bath, and spent the latter years of his life in Queen Charlton, a village just outside Keynsham, between Bath and Bristol.  He is best known for The Sheep Pig, on which the movie Babe was based.  

Gill Lewis has a Masters degree in Writing for Young People from Bath Spa University and won the 2009 course prize for most promising writer.  Her first children's book was Skyhawk.  She lives in Somerset.

Sue Mongredien grew up in Nottingham but lives in Bath.  She has published over 100 children's books, including the popular Oliver Moon series.

Sally Nicholls' first children’s novel, Ways to Live Forever, was written while she was a student at Bath Spa University: it won the Waterstones' Children's Book of the Year Award in 2008.

Maudie Smith is another graduate of Bath Spa University. Her debut novel for children was Opal Moonbaby.

Geoffrey Trease (Bows against the Barons, Cue for Treason etc) spent his last years in Bath, to which he and his wife had moved from Malvern shortly before her death. He died in Bath in 1998.

Stephen Voake (The Dreamwalker's Child) is a prize-winning author and former head-teacher who is now Senior Lecturer in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University.  He comes from Midsomer Norton and lives near Bath.

Rachel Ward lives in Bath.  Her first novel, Numbers, (published 2009), was shortlisted for Waterstones' Children's Book Prize and longlisted for the Carnegie. 

Jacqueline Wilson was born Jacqueline Aitken in Bath, where her father was working as a civil servant.  She first found fame with the Tracey Beaker books, going on to become Children's Laureate 2005-2007.

Bath-based Moira Young won the Costa Children's Book of the Year prize 2011 for Blood Red Road.  A native of Canada, she came to the UK in 1983/4 and now lives in Bath.

We have a winner! Landmarks & Legends Writing Competition

Our book group has a prize-winning children's author of its very own!  Congratulations to Hannah Sackett on becoming the first winner of the Landmarks & Legends creative writing competition organised by Salisbury Cathedral in conjunction with Orion Children's Publishing, in collaboration with children's author Cornelia Funke, of Inkheart fame.

Landmarks and Legends writing competition was launched by Cornelia Funke in October 2012 for the UK launch of her book Ghost Knight, which was inspired by Salisbury Cathedral and the true story of the first person to be buried there. Stories submitted to the competition had to be set in a real, historical location and include some real characters from history or be based on actual events and local legends.  They also had to be suitable for children between ten and fifteen years old.

You can read Hannah's winning story, the Bath-related Legend of Bladud (as told by one of his pigs) here. Salisbury Cathedral Story Competition Winner

There's more information about the competition, the winner and the runners-up here. Salisbury Cathedral Press Release about Landmarks & Legends competition

January 2013: Elizabeth Enright's "The Saturdays" and our February book

Remember when the weekends seemed endless, when children had time for adventures and when they were allowed to take a few risks?  Elizabeth Enright's The Saturdays (1941) captures those seemingly lost-forever golden days just perfectly.  This is the first in her series of four books about the Melendy children, who live with their widowed father in a shabby brownstone on the Lower East Side of New York City, in the days when ordinary families could occupy an entire house in Manhattan and when individual children could roam the streets of the Big Apple, relying on nice policemen to take them home on horseback if they got lost.

Loved by generations of American children, the multiple-prize-winning Enright and her charming stories are surprisingly and undeservedly less well known on this side of the Atlantic than they should be.  Her format is familiar but always popular: the somewhat chaotic and slightly impoverished but affectionate household, with a single (often professionally absent) parent; a beloved housekeeper who valiantly tries to keep everyone in check; a scruffy mongrel dog; a group of children who each have their own talents - in this case the musical one, the dramatic one, the scatty one and the Youngest One - while Time hangs heavy and there are opportunities for good-natured mischief, scrapes and adventure.

The four Melendy children pool their weekly pocket money so that each child in turn can afford a Big Adventure.  And these are very nice children, whose adventures all become learning experiences, most of which would make any parent proud: a trip to an art gallery, an outing to the opera, a visit to the hairdresser's, an afternoon at the circus and boating on the lake in Central Park.  There's no wasting of talent here.  

But there's a darker undercurrent too.  The children hear about the seamier side of life from people they encounter along the way: one was kidnapped by gypsies, while another was driven out of her abusive home with her brother and lived on the city's streets.  The Melendys nearly die from carbon monoxide poisoning one night, and on another occasion they accidentally set fire to their own home.

The joy of reading Enright is in the neatness of her structure and the simple purity and clarity of her writing.  Her children are wonderfully characterised, while humour prevents them from descending into cuteness. She also imparts a genuine sense of time and location, weaving real people, places and events through the narrative, which makes the stories both believable and effective. She writes about New York City in 1941 with the affectionate eye of a local, but a strong awareness of the plight of children thousands of miles away in London suffering from nightly bombing raids.  

Elizabeth Enright was born in 1909 to a political cartoonist father and a mother who was a designer and illustrator.  Her maternal uncle was the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.  Enright followed in her (by then divorced) parents' footsteps, going to  art college and herself becoming an illustrator before turning to writing and then to literary criticism.  She won the Newbery Prize for children's writing in 1939 (the equivalent of the UK's Carnegie Medal), the first of many such awards.  She was also a successful writer of short stories for adults.  There is some confusion surrounding her early death in 1968 aged just 58: some internet sources claim she committed suicide, while her New York Times obituary simply states that she died at home following a short illness.  

What a wonderful discovery this book was for us all.

Next month we are reading The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne-Jones (1980), together with a posthumous reminiscence about Diana by her son, Colin Burrow, which was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2011.