Category: General

Trawling the internet, researching libraries and databases, and occasionally from material sent to me, I discover things I did not know much about, or indeed at all! There can be more than one Discovery of the Day.

One of first display advertisements in a British newspaper for children’s novel by Rosemary Sutcliff | 1951 in The Guardian

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Advertisement for Rosemary Sutclif’s The Armourer’s House

Source: The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959); Oct 4, 1951

One source of inspiration for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks: Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern Bearers

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Cover of The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks was nominated for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Holly Sykes, the heroine, appears in some form in each of its six segments, which begin in 1984 and stretch to 2034. The sixth and final portion imagines a near future in which an ‘Endarkment’ has reset the world into barbaric times.

In an interview for an online magazine about books, arts, and culture—The Millions— David Mitchell was asked whether any specific sources inspired his vision of how the world might look in twenty years time. He spoke first of a “really good book published in the 1950s called The Death of Grass where a killer virus doesn’t kill us, humans…but gets the crops we eat”. The second source of inspiration was Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth series, which is “the book that Holly is reading to the kids in the last section”.

Cover of The Lantern Bearers

 

Cover of The Death of Grass

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rosemary Sutcliff … was an English, wheelchair-bound classicist in the 1950s who wrote about the Romans leaving Britain and the collapse of Roman civilization. The series focuses on the power vacuums a collapse of that magnitude leaves, and how the innocents always end up having to pay more then the soldiers. Those books are colossal. They are fantastic. In the third book of the trilogy, The Lantern Bearers, the best of the three, there is a scene where the Roman ships leave the shores of Britain for the last time, and they know it’s the last time. What are they leaving behind? What’s going to happen to these people? That’s what was at the forefront of my mind—really how our world will look to my daughter as she grows—as I was writing that last section.

Frank Cottrell Boyce says too much analysis of books puts children and young people off reading

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Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of Millions

Like Rosemary Sutcliff, Frank Cottrell Boyce was awarded the Carnegie medal—for his children’s book, Millions. Like Rosemary, he believes passionately in reading for the sake of reading. I suspect also that, like Rosemary, he is passionate about being read to.

An article in the Guardian newspaper on Friday last quotes him from a lecture in which he argues that children are too often asked to analyse the text of a book or respond to a story with their own story, thus “polluting the whole reading experience”.

I visit many schools. I see amazing, creative work being done – especially in primary schools. But I have a nagging fear that in encouraging literacy we are killing the pleasure of reading…

There’s a humbling, Homeric magic in the sight of a crowd of children sitting down waiting to listen to your story…

Time and time again I come across teachers reading a story and then asking immediately for some kind of feedback. A piece of ‘creative writing’ ‘inspired by’ the story. Some opinions about character and wow words. Something to show the parents or the school inspectors. It pollutes the reading experience by bringing something transactional in to play. It destroys pleasure.

Pleasure in reading is deeply important. Pleasure is a profound and potent form of attention, a kind of slow thinking.When I offer you a story I don’t want you to come back to me with a description of how I did it. I don’t think of my reader as a trainee writer. I’m hoping that it stays in your mind and comes out in different ways I could never have predicted – as an engineering idea, as a cake, as a hug that you give your dad.

We think of reading as a solitary activity but some of my most important reading experiences were very much shared.

Rosemary Sutcliff awarded The Carnegie Medal, Zilveren Griffel award,Boston-Globe Horn Book Award, The Other Award, The Phoenix Award

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Yesterday I read about both the Man-Booker Prize for Fiction, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize (for children’s and young adult literature). It put me in mind of some of the awards Rosemary Sutcliff won or was commended for (nearly won!).

Rosemary Sutcliff talked 30 years ago about her childhood, disability, painting, historical fiction, children’s literature, on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs

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Within her conversation in 1983 on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, Rosemary Sutcliff  made a wealth of informative and moving comments about her life and work, some ten years before she died in 1992. These statments are extracted from the transcript:

To my shame I have to admit that I was born in Surrey, but  I count myself as a West Country woman, as a Devonshire woman.

Music is important in my life, but I’m not musical, I don’t know a thing about how it works. I’m one of those dreadful people who just ‘know what they like’.

I have a great fondness for good old-fashioned American cowboy films.

My very first memory is from when I was only eighteen months old, and we know that it was so because I was never in the place that it happened again until I was seven. I was taken for a walk—I was taken along a path, and I came out from the narrowness of this path into an open space, where there were things in cages. Notably a squirrel, restlessly sort of wandering round and round his cage, obviously with a headache. And all the injustices and sorrows of the world broke over my head for the first time at that sight, and I broke forth into bellows of tears and had to be removed from the park.

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