“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.”
Source: Townsend, John Rowe. 1971. A Sense of Story. London: Longman p. 201
Children’s author Joan Aiken writes that to be a children’s writer, you need imagination, iconoclasm, a deep instinctive morality, a large vocabulary, a sense of humor and a powerful sense of pity and justice. Rosemary Sutcliff has all that and more.
source: The English Journal, Vol. 74, No. 7 (Nov., 1985), pp. 83-84
The Sword and The Circle is the first part of The Eagle of the Ninth author Rosemary Sutcliff’s trilogy of tellings of the King Arthur legend. In the introduction she wrote about the real man Arthur.
Many people believe, as I do, that behind the legends of King Arthur as we know them today, there stands a real man. Read More »
Rosemary wrote a monograph about Rudyard Kipling.
‘My schooling began late, owing to a childhood illness, and ended when I was only fourteen, owing to my entire lack of interest in being educated. But I showed signs of being able to paint, and so from school I went to art school, trained hard, and eventually became a professional miniature painter. I did not start to write until the end of the War, but now I have switched completely from one medium to the other, and it is several years since I last touched paint.’ Of the Kipling book she said, ‘My reason for writing this monograph will be obvious to anyone who reads it: I have loved Kipling for as long as I can remember.’
For more posts on Kipling see here.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 