I have been trying to nudge upwards the number of followers of (people who “like”) the Facebook ‘page’ on Rosemary Sutcliff. Progress is slow. However the ‘viral effect’ is moving in the right direction, whatever exactly it is. (I have yet to get my head around that, no doubt simple, metric).
The Margaret A. Edwards Award is new to me. It honours an author for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature” and is organised by the young adult division of the American Library Association. The 2012 winner is Susan Cooper for The Dark Is Rising series: Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark Is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; and Silver on the Tree. Interesting post today from Anne at the ‘You Write!’ tab (uo at the top) on this site, about the connectedness and origins of Rosemary Sutcliff‘s stories and books of historical fiction.
Readers have often wondered if Rosemary Sutcliff had the whole Aquila family sequence already mapped out when she wrote Eagle of the Ninth, so I thought it might be of interest to note her emphatic reply when asked about this:Read More »
I discovered in 2010 that renowned Cornish writer Anna Maria Murphy was a great fan of Rosemary Sutcliff, author of children’s books and historical fiction. Anna writes for Theatre, as well as radio.
As a girl and a young woman, Rosemary Sutcliff was my absolute favourite writer and The Mark Of The Horse Lord one of my favourite books of all time. She was unlike any other writer for young people … ahead of her time by generations. She was one of the reasons I wanted to write as a young person … I always wanted to meet her … I wrote to her once, and she sent a lovely reply, but I lost the letter many years ago.
Anna began to write for theatre to avoid playing a dog! Her writing for Kneehigh has included ‘Don John’, ‘The Bacchae’, ‘The Red Shoes’, ‘Tristan & Yseult’, ‘Skulduggery’, ‘Doubtful Island’ ‘Ghost Nets’, ‘Women Who Threw the Day Away’, ‘Telling Tales’, ‘Wild Bride’ (The Shamans) and the film ‘Flight’. She has also written for Theatre Alibi, Platform 4, Brainstorm Films, The Eden Project, and several plays for Radio 4.
(Re-post from 2010, slightly updated)
Like the sudden opening of a cavern in his head, reality burnt upon Phaedrus, and in that ice-bright splinter of time he understood at last that this was a fight to the death, that he was fighting, not his comrade Vortimax, whom he had fought scores and hundreds of times before, but death, red-rending death such as the stag’s had been, and the hooks of the mercuries in the dark alleyway.
(from The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff )
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 