Susan Cooper at Pembroke College, Oxford, to give the Tolkien Lecture in 2017. Photo courtesy of Pembroke College Tolkien Lecture. The Newbery Award had no effect on my work, I believe — apart from making it temporarily harder, due to the mean little voice in one’s head that sneers: Okay,...
Susan Cooper delivers the Horn Book at Simmons keynote. Photo: Elissa Gershowitz.The very day that Roger asked me to give this talk, my grand-daughter stopped by my house after a science lesson. She was full of information. “Nana,” she said, “did you know that after a caterpillar has gone into...
Like many fantasy writers born and raised in Britain, I am haunted by Celtic and Arthurian myth; it goes with the territory. Even before I could read, I’d been shown the footprint of King Arthur’s horse up on the mountain above my grandmother’s village in Wales, and the mist that...
Margaret Mahy. Photo by Ken Silber.There was never anyone quite like her. Other amazing children’s writers have won the Hans Christian Andersen Award, but none had her extra‑ordinary range: verse; picture-book texts; books for every conceivable age group; scripts for radio, television, film; serials for newspapers and magazines. “I have...