Kevin John William Crossley-Holland (born 7 February 1941) is an English children's author and poet.
Born in Mursley, north Buckinghamshire, Holland grew up in Whiteleaf, a small village in the Chilterns. He attended Bryanston School in Dorset, followed by St Edmund Hall at Oxford University, where after failing his first exams he discovered a passion for Anglo-Saxon literature. After graduating he became the Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, and from 1972–1977, he lectured in Anglo-Saxon for the Tufts University of London program. He also taught in the Midwest of America as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at St. Olaf College, as well as Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of St. Thomas.
His writing career began when he began working as a poetry, fiction and children’s book editor for Macmillan Publishers. He later become editorial director at Victor Gollancz. He is well-known for his poetry, novels, story collections, translations such as the classic Beowulf (1968,[1] 1973,[2] 1999[3]) and reinterpretations of medieval legends such as his Arthur trilogy. He also writes definitive collections of Norse myths (Viking!: Myths of Gods and Monsters) and British and Irish folk-tales (The Magic Lands: Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland). He has edited and translated the riddles from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book.[4]
He has also written the libretti for two operas by Nicola LeFanu, The Green Children (1966) and The Wildman (1976), as well as a chamber opera about Nelson, Haydn and Emma Hamilton; and a stage play – The Wuffings (1999), as well as several collaborations with composers Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias.
Holland now lives on the North Norfolk coast, where he spent some of his childhood.
His autobiography, The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood, was published in 2009.[5]
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Awards
His children's novels have earned several awards. Storm, his novella, won the Carnegie Medal in 1985, and in 2007 was selected by judges of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children's literature as one of the ten most important children's novels of the past 70 years. The Seeing Stone (2000), the first part of the Arthur Trilogy which concluded with At the Crossing-Places (2001) and King of the Middle March (2003), won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Tir na n-Og prize and the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Bronze Medal, as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread Awards. Gatty's Tale was shortlisted for the 2008 Carnegie Medal.[6]
Arthur Trilogy
These are probably his best-known works and have been published in 22 different countries. The trilogy is composed of The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing-Places and the King of the Middle March. It is a new look at the King Arthur legends and over the course of the three books it shows Arthur's (the main character) development from a nothing to a squire and finally a knight. As well as this steady promotion, there are the normal problems a young teenage boy would face such as what girl he wants to be betrothed with and his inheritance. On top of this, he has his stone; a mysterious obsidian that shows a mirror image of his own life at Camelot. A follow-up to the Arthur Trilogy, Gatty's Tale, was published in 2006.
References
- ^ Illustrations by Brigitte Hanff; introduction by Bruce Mitchell. London: Macmillan, 1968.
- ^ Illustrations by Virgil Burnett; introduction by Bruce Mitchell. London: Folio Society, 1973. ISBN 0850670667
- ^ Edited by Heather O'Donoghue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 9780192833204
- ^ Crossley-Holland, Kevin (2008). The Exeter Book Riddles. London: Enitharmon Press. ISBN 9056373709.
- ^ Crossley-Holland, Kevin (2009). The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood. London: Quercus. ISBN 9781847247360.
- ^ Carnegie Awards
External links
- Personal website
- The Archive of Kevin Crossley-Holland, Leeds University Library
- Biography, The Northern Children's Book Festival, 2003
- The Guardian: Interview
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