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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Peter Dickinson, born in 1927, has written more than fifty novels for adults and young readers; and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Award twice.
He is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a
lot of untidy gray hair and a weird hooting voice – in fact he looks and
sounds a bit like Gandalf’s crazy twin, but he’s only rather absent-minded,
probably because he’s thinking about something else. Day-dreaming, mostly.
He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls.
Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in
the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water, so that
the crocs couldn’t get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to
his grandfather’s ostrich farm in South Africa.
Then the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to
English Schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn’t have
an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a
story. He was fairly good at games.
He’s led an ordinary kind of life – not much by way of adventures, but
some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army, just after World
War II, they managed to turn him into two people; so he was bashing away at
infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two sea-sick military
policemen showed up and arrested him for being a deserter from a different camp
in the south of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.
He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it
was that sort of household) said to him at dinner one day "Ah, sir, it’s
a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!" (Peter’s
screams, not the boy’s.)
And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first
job and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job
because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.
He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six
grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in England.
Peter Dickinson's website
This bio was last updated on 10/20/2014. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
The danger of living in a golden age of children’s literature is that not
enough rubbish is being produced.
Nobody who has not spent a whole sunny afternoon under his bed rereading a
pile of comics left over from the previous holidays has any real idea of the
meaning of intellectual freedom.
Nobody who has not written comic strips can really understand the phrase,
economy of words. It’s like trying to write Paradise Lost in haiku.
The above remarks, and a few more like them, have now
haunted me for five years. They were part of a digression in a talk I gave to
the 1970 Exeter conference on children’s literature, and if I’d realised
then what a powder-keg I was throwing my fag-end of thought into I would have
kept my trap shut. I’ve no wish to be type-cast as the man who likes rubbish.
On the other hand I did (and do) believe what I said then, and what follows is a
more serious attempt to formulate my ideas.
I have always believed that children ought to be allowed to read a certain
amount of rubbish. Sometimes quite a high proportion of their reading matter can
healthfully consist of things that no sane adult would actually encourage them
to read. But I had ...
David Almond, in his own words:
I was born in Newcastle and I grew up in a big Catholic family in
Felling-on-Tyne. I had four sisters and a brother and lots of relatives in the
streets nearby. My dad had been in Burma ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
Inside Grandad
Try:
My Dad's A Birdman
by David Almond
It's a pipe dream of many an aspiring author: publish your debut novel, claim a spot on the New York Times bestseller list, and rack up an astonishing array of awards, including a Newbery Honor. For Kate DiCamillo, ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Inside Grandad
Try:
The Tiger Rising
by Kate DiCamillo
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