Rosemary Sutcliff always acknowledged a debt to and love for Rudyard Kipling. She wrote a small book, a monograph, about him. I have just discovered this article in the journal of the Kipling Society, The Kipling Journal, in 1965. She wrote:
” … other people write about things from the outside in, but Kipling writes about them from the inside out.”
Historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff won the top UK literary children’s book award from the Library Association, the Carnegie Medal, for The Lantern Bearers in 1959.
The Carnegie Medal is awarded every year in the UK to the writer of an outstanding book for children. Read More »
Philip Reeve fears that the ‘beautiful’ writing of historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff is in danger of being forgotten. Author of The Mortal Engines Quartet (someone once called it ‘alternative history’ not ‘science fiction’) and the Larklight in 2009, Reeve wrote in The Daily Telegraph of his fears.
With so many good new books for children being published all the time, I sometimes fear that the classics of my childhood are in danger of being forgotten. So I’d recommend Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels, particularly Warrior Scarlet and The Eagle of the Ninth – cracking adventures, beautifully written, filled with a profound sense of the British landscape and its past.
According to the curious and enchanting Larklight website,:
Mr Philip Reeve was born and raised in the bustling seaside slum of Brighton. Like all residents of that vile town he fled as soon as he was able, and now lives in a secluded cottage on Dartmoor, where frequent encounters with gigantic house spiders and fruitless efforts to preserve his tweed and serge against the voracious moth have given Mr Reeve a deep understanding of Art Mumby’s plight. He is the author of the bestselling Mortal Engines quartet.
Source: The Daily Telegraph , July 4, 2009 ; The Guardian, September 30, 2006 Saturday Review p20.
Rosemary Sutcliff was a children’s writer and historical novelist who believed in re-incarnation. She told me , as she did other people, that she once found herself telling someone who suggested that perhaps Roman soldiering would be her fate in a future life that “she had already had enough of soldiering”. She believed in it for animals too, including her own. Hence her book A Little Dog Like You (1987), in which a woman whose beloved small dog has died finds him again when he is reborn in the body of a new puppy.
Author G R Grove, who has written Storyteller, Flight of the Hawk, and The Ash Spear, has alerted me to two welsh editions of Rosemary’s books. Cwchwlin Penarwr Iwerddon is The Hound of Ulster. Merch y Pennaeth is The Chief’s Daughter.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 