Posts about authors other than Rosemary Sutcliff
Rosemary Sutcliff and Karen Cushman are ‘moved to write historical fiction’ for the same reason
I write historical fiction because those are the stories that take me over. Rosemary Sutcliff, writer of gorgeous historical novels for young people, said, ‘Historians and teachers, you and your kind can produce the bare bones; I and my kind breathe life into them.’ That’s what I’m interested in — the life in those bones.
A writer of children’s books and historical fiction, Rosemary Sutcliff was the UK nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1968 and in 1974, when she was ‘highly commended’ internationally. Hans Christian Andersen is celebrated today by a ‘Google doodle’ on the 205th anniversary of the Danish author ‘s birth. I wonder, could I get Google to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Rosemary Sutcliff’s birth on December 14th this year?
Rosemary Sutcliff was a story-teller. Children’s writer and film author , Frank Cottrell-Boyce, guest on Desert Island Discs today, chose a wonderful story-telling Irish girl as one of his pieces of ‘music’. He could hardly contain his glee listening, presenter Kirsty Young said! Listen here on BBC iPlayer at 26.10 mins into the recording (if it is still there: I think BBC only allows Desert Island discs for a week or so on iPlayer).
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
Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a monograph about the British writer of the Just So stories, Rudyard Kipling, who was a major influence on her fiction writing for children, young adults and adults. She wrote in the introduction to the book that she had loved Kipling ever since she could remember.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 