Alan Garner

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Alan Garner OBE (born in Congleton, Cheshire, 17 October 1934) is an English writer whose work is firmly rooted in Cheshire.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Alan Garner spent his early childhood in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, England, and he remains associated with the area. Many of his works, including The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, are drawn from local legends and locations.

He had long periods of ill health in childhood and was twice declared dead.

"He spent most of the first eight years of his life in a small, white sickbed....'By day, it amounted to sensory deprivation. I lay in a bedroom that was whitewashed and had cheesecloth stretched across the windows...I was so bored, I would create my own out-of-body experiences....At night, it was worse. When you're lying in the semi-darkness, and the moon is coming up, and half of you is paralysed, there is no end to the terrible things a heap of clothes can change into.'" [1]

He attended Manchester Grammar School (where a library is named after him) and studied Classics at Oxford.

His early books were fantasy, marketed for children, though he was not ever comfortable with being labelled simply as a "children's writer", saying he had no intention one way or the other about writing specifically for children.[2]

His most recent works, Strandloper and Thursbitch, are more suited for adult readers. The Stone Book (which received the Phoenix Award in 1996) is poetic in style and inspiration. Garner pays particular attention to language, and strives to render the cadence of the Cheshire tongue in modern English. This he explains by the sense of anger he felt on reading "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight": the footnotes would not have been needed by his father. This and other aspects of his writing are the subject of Neil Philip's A Fine Anger, (Collins, 1981), which offers a detailed analysis of his work.

His works have won the Guardian Award, the Carnegie Medal, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, as well as the Chicago International Film Festival 1st Prize for his educational film Images.

His collection of essays and public talks, The Voice That Thunders, contains much autobiographical material (including an account of his life with bipolar disorder), as well as critical reflection upon folklore and language, literature and education, the nature of myth and time. Garner is an accomplished public speaker.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Owl Service are acknowledged classics of children's literature.

He was awarded the OBE for services to literature in the 2001 New Year's Honours list.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Collections

  • The Stone Book Quartet (1979) - Collection of the four The Stone Book short stories.
  • The Alan Garner Collection (Collins, 2005) - Slipcased collection of paperbacks: The Owl Service, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, Elidor and A Bag of Moonshine.

[edit] Short Stories

  • Feel Free (1967)
  • A Book of Goblins (ed) (1969)
  • The Stone Book (1976) - First story in The Stone Book.
  • Tom Fobble's Day (1977) - Second story in The Stone Book.
  • Granny Reardun (1977) - Third story in The Stone Book.
  • The Aimer Gate (1978) - Fourth story in The Stone Book.
  • Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979)
  • Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984)
  • A Bag of Moonshine (1986) - A collection of 22 stories chosen from the folklore of England and Wales.
  • Fairytales of Gold (1989)
  • The Lad of the Gad (1980)
  • Once Upon a Time (1993)

[edit] Essays and Lectures

  • The Voice That Thunders (1997) - A collection of essays and lectures

[edit] Edited

  • The Guizer: A Book of Fools (1975) - A collection of stories about fools.

[edit] TV Drama

  • The Owl Service (1969) - A British TV series by Granada Television based on Garner's novel of the same name.
  • Red Shift (BBC, transmitted 17 January 1978) - Directed by John Mackenzie; part of the BBC's Play for Today series.
  • To Kill a King (1980) - Part of the BBC series of plays on supernatural themes, Leap in the Dark: an atmospheric story about a writer overcoming depression and writer's block. The hero's home appears to be Garner's own house.
  • Garner and Don Webb adapted Elidor into a children's television series for the BBC. The series consisted of six half-hour episodes starring Damian Zuk as Roland and Suzanne Shaw as Helen

[edit] Awards

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Alan Garner, Radio Times interview, 14 January 1995)
  2. ^ Garner Interview
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner"
Personal tools