Aidan Chambers

(1934–), British writer, critic, and lecturer on the teaching of English. Born into a nonreading working-class household near Durham in the north of England, Chambers came to appreciate reading as a teenager under the guidance of an inspirational teacher whose influence has resonated in all aspects of his long and distinguished professional life. Reading D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers at the age of fifteen convinced Chambers that he was a writer, and that it was important for young people to be able to read about people like themselves. After he qualified as a teacher in 1957, Chambers taught English and drama at a boys’ school before spending seven years in a monastic order dedicated to working with young people. During that time, he taught in a secondary modern school for pupils who had failed the examination taken at age eleven, which at the time sorted British schoolchildren by ability. (Chambers himself had failed the exam, though his ability was subsequently recognized and he was reassigned to the more academic environment of a grammar school.) While teaching, he began writing plays and stories for his pupils, some of which were published. He resigned from his order in 1967 to embark on a career as a writer, critic, workshop leader, publisher, and lecturer. In 1969 he married, and with his wife, Nancy Chambers, set up the Thimble Press, which produced one hundred numbers of the journal Signal and more than thirty books about children's and young adult literature and their readers. In 1982, the couple were joint recipients of the Eleanor Farjeon Award for services to children's literature. Aidan Chambers received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2002 and the Michael Printz Award in 2003.

In addition to his fiction, Chambers has written some highly regarded and influential books about teaching literature, among them Booktalk (1985), Tell Me: Children, Reading, and Talking (1993), and Reading Talk (2001). He has also written for the stage, radio, television, and a range of newspapers and magazines. He edited collections of various kinds and was a cofounder of Turton and Chambers, which published translated children's books from Europe.

Although Chambers has written some important books for younger readers, including The Present Takers (1983), one of the earlier novels to deal with bullying in school, he is best known for his young adult Dance Sequence of six related novels, beginning with Breaktime (1978) and concluding with This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn (2005). The books feature teenage, usually male protagonists who have much in common, though the cast of characters changes from book to book, and who incorporate autobiographical aspects of their creator. Each book in the sequence is courageous and innovative. Breaktime is stylistically varied and challenging, drawing equally on literary tradition and challenges to it arising from modernism; indeed, it anticipates many features of postmodern novels. Its stylistic pyrotechnics include incorporation of images drawn from comics and graphic novels; it also acknowledges that young people are sexually active, in two cerebral but also comical and affirming sex scenes. Youthful sexuality is also central to Dance on My Grave (1982), which centers on the short but intense relationship of two gay teenagers, and The Toll Bridge (1992), which raises questions about casual sex and AIDS in an intelligent and unsensational way. Postcards from No Man's Land (1999; awarded the Carnegie Medal) takes its protagonist, Jan, to Amsterdam, where he encounters many kinds of sexuality as well as aspects of his family history through a double narrative that moves between World War II and the present. Now I Know (1987) is more concerned with a young man's struggles with belief and rational thought than with his sexual experiences, though there is a strong love interest in it, too. Beyond the sometimes explicit sexual content, each novel operates on many levels and is stylistically rich. The Toll Bridge deals sensitively with the issue of depression; the plot of Now I Know considers the possibility of the second coming of Christ in the modern world.