Author: Anthony Lawton

Chair, Sussex Dolphin, family company which looks after the work of eminent children’s & historical fiction author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). Formerly CEO, chair & trustee of various charity, cultural & educational enterprises in UK. Sometimes a consultant.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern Bearers | Folio Society edition a Christmas present for friends or family?

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The Folio Society’s beautiful version of Rosemary Sutcliff’s award-winning historical novel The Lantern Bearers is the latest of  their wonderful reproductions of Rosemary Sutcliff novels. Perhaps a fitting present for someone this Christmas – it can be ordered online?

Winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal in 1957, The Lantern Bearers is, in some people’s eyes, the best and  most thoughtful of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles. Penelope Lively’s, who knew Rosemary well, and spoke at the memorial service we organised for her way back in 1992, has written a special new introduction. She comments:

It is a work of her maturity, one in which she had already honed all her signature skills – her power of narrative, of pace, her way with characters, the rich evocations of a Britain that is gone but that she had recreated. It is full of the creamy surf of meadowsweet alongside crimson cloaks flying in the wind …

This edition is illustrated by the award-winning Russian artist, Roman Pisarev.

Source: The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Folio Society.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s beautiful miniature nativity scene | Christmas

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Christmas preparations and celebrations are upon us. I am reminded of a post by my son last year:

Before Rosemary Sutcliff  became I writer, she was an artist. She made beautiful miniatures. One of her set of miniatures is a stunning nativity scene. As Rosemary was my dad’s Godmother and cousin, we inherited some of her possessions when she died in 1992. The nativity scene was one of those possessions and every Christmas we put it out next to the christmas tree in the front hall of our family home in Leicester. Here are some photographs my wife took …  of this beautiful piece of art.

Rosemary Sutcliff on Desert Island Discs in 1983

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Rosemary Sutcliff was on Desert Island Discs on the BBC with Roy Plomley in 1983, before she had written all her 50+ books. I am hoping that eventually the BBC will post the recording itself. Then you would hear her and her reasons for her choice of eight pieces of music to take to her desert island shipwreck.Rosemary Sutcliff's Desert Island Discs Choices

Source: BBC

Arthurian writer and history novelist Rosemary Sutcliff is a spellbinder

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Rosemary Sutcliff is a spellbinder. While we read, we believe everything she says. She has hammered out a style that rises and falls like the waves of the sea.

Comment of a US reviewer in 1963, the year that best-seller The Sword at Sunset was published.

Source: Robert Payne in New York Review, May 26, 1963.

Ancestors of Rosemary Sutcliff | Children’s writer and historical novelist

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

I have been researching Rosemary Sutcliff’s ancestors as well as my own, indeed they overlap because Rosemary’s mother was my grandfather’s sister. This is what I think her tree looks like as far as I have got at present.
Family tree of Rosemary Sutcliff

Ancestry.co.uk