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

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

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 in her own words on radio and in her autobiography in 1983

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment
Rosemary Sutcliff tells her own story, about her life until her first books were published, and she started writing a diary, in Blue Remembered Hills—A Recollection. It has been most recently republished by Slightly Foxed. It was first published in 1983 by The Bodley Head.

Rosemary Sutcliff talks about herself and her writing—the only recorded interview with her that I have heard— in an interview on BBC Radio with Roy Plomley for an edition of the long-running, classic radio programme Desert Island Discs, also in 1983. Roy Plomley had presumably read her memoir. 

When anybody asks me where I was born, or when I am called on to provide that information in filling out a form, I admit with a distinct sense of apology that I was born in Surrey.
(Blue Remembered Hills, opening sentence)

Writer of historical fiction and children’s literature Rosemary Sutcliff didn’t write as child at school

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff spent a limited time in formal school education, but it did not hinder her  in becoming what The Guardian newspaper called on her death ‘a writer of genius’.

I didn’t go to school for a very long time because of traipsing around so much. My mother used to educate me herself, chiefly by just reading to me the books that she liked. (But I did go to school, and I’ve always been very thankful that I went to an ordinary school, I never got incarcerated with other disabled children).

(But) chiefly I had books read to me, which is a thing I love to this day. I didn’t learn to read for myself until I was very old. Me and Kipling, we were both nine before we could read: I think in my case  this was because my mother read aloud to me so much, and this I loved very very much.

I left school, which one could do at fourteen in those days, and put in three years at art school. I did the general art course—painting in oils and water-colours and making charcoal drawings of the Apollo Belvedere from the north, south, east, and west!

I had not written as a child, I had not written stories. I wasn’t at all writing-minded at school.

Rosemary Sutcliff, disabled by juvenile arthritis, was thankful to go to inclusive school, not ‘incarcerated with other disabled children’

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff was very ill as a child with juvenile arthritis. She spent much of her time when very young in hospital or a spinal carriage ‘rather like a coffin’, only went to school aged nine, and was disabled from the disease all her life.

A spinal carriage was rather like a coffin; it was very uncomfortable, and you lay flat out in this thing, and of course all you could see were the branches of the trees or the roofs of the houses going by overhead. And it was extremely boring. With any luck you were perhaps allowed to sit up on the way home from a walk.

Spinal carriage similar to Rosemary Sutcliff's

I didn’t go to school for a very long time …My mother used to educate me herself, chiefly by just reading to me the books that she liked. But I did go to school, and I’ve always been very thankful that I went to an ordinary school, I never got incarcerated with other disabled children.

Read More »

4 kinds of people in Malta that author of historical fiction and children’s literature, Rosemary Sutcliff, remembers from her childhood

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff’s father was a naval officer, posted to Malta when she was very young.

I remember little cameos of Malta. I remember branches of an orange tree hanging over a wall. And I remember the people coming and going in the streets. Four kinds of people in particular: priests, who I remember as wearing lace petticoats. You know one’s memory is a little kind of peculiar at that age—I was only about three. Goats, usually with a paper bag hanging out of their mouths, because they ate anything and everything, and used to be milked on the doorstep, which was a great way of spreading Malta fever I believe. Sailors of course, everywhere; and in those days still a great many women wearing the faldetta, which I don’t suppose you would ever see in Malta nowadays, which was a very becoming head-dress.