Category: Autobiography & Biography

Posts on the rosemarysutcliff.com weblog about the life and thoughts of Rosemary Sutcliff, including what she wrote and said about writing and her own craft.

Rosemary Sutcliff is unequaled in children’s historical fiction | Guardian books blog

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

The writing of Rosemary Sutcliff is loved by Imogen Russell Williams, director of Have Your Cake Theatre – a fringe theatre company. Her areas of ‘anorak expertise’ (according to the Guardian website) include ‘children’s books, classical tragedy and Golden Age crime fiction’. No wonder that for her:

… the nonpareil of children’s historical fiction remains Rosemary Sutcliff, whose books about Bronze Age Britain (Warrior Scarlet; Sun Horse, Moon Horse) and Roman Britain, particularly The Eagle of the Ninth and The Lantern Bearers, were intensely memorable to me as a child and part of the reason I eventually chose to study classics at university. Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff writing about war and violence ‘intense, convincing, apparently unrestrained’

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Rosemary Sutcliff‘s writing about violence and war, described by The Independent (UK) newspaper obituary on her death in 1992:

…  Sutcliff had an exceptional ability to describe the complexity of army strategies and the details of combat as well as to capture the emotions of fighting on any scale. Her war scenes are intense, convincing and apparently unrestrained, walking a delicate tightrope which prevents them from lapsing into the bloodthirsty. Sutcliff was never sadistic or cruel. She did not whitewash war or violence, but she did not relish it either. She recognised it as part and parcel of our past.

Rosemary Sutcliff, children’s writer and historical novelist of The Minstrel Kind

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Readers of Rosemary Sutcliff have to expect to be spellbound in the tradition of storytelling that’s much older than reading and writing, when before the days of written records bards and minstrels were entrusted with the memory of a tribe. Rosemary Sutcliff is in this tradition; she says of herself that she’s ‘of the minstrel kind’. Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff can write for children | Brain impaired Martin Amis cannot

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff often said she wrote “for children aged 8 to 88” or sometimes “9 to 90”. She once said:

“The themes of my children’s books are mostly quite adult, and in fact the difference between writing for children and for adults is, to me at any rate, only a quite small gear change.”

It is a change of gear clearly beyond author Martin Amis! Read More »

Book Awards won by Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment
I am trying to make accurate my list of all book awards Rosemary Sutcliff was given or nominated for. This is my summary so far: can readers help me expand and improve it?
  • 1959: The Carnegie Medal, The Lantern Bearers
  • 1968: The Hans Christian Andersen Award, nominated
  • 1971: Zilveren Griffel – The Silver Pencil, in Holland
  • 1972: The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, Tristan and Iseult
  • 1974: The Hans Christian Andersen Award, highly commended
  • 1978: The Other Award, Song for a Dark Queen (A children’s book award focusing on anti-sexist, anti-racist titles in the UK).
  • 1985: The Phoenix Award, The Mark of the Horse Lord
  • 2010: The Phoenix Award, The Shining Company