Jill Paton Walsh
Jill Paton Walsh, CBE, FRSL (born 29 April 1937) is an English novelist and children's writer.
Born as Gillian Bliss and educated at St. Michael's Convent,[1] North Finchley, London, she read English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. She lives in Cambridge.
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[edit] Works
Novels for children include: The Dolphin Crossing, Fireweed, Babylon, Hengest's Tale, A Parcel of Patterns, Birdy and the Ghosties, Grace, Thomas and the Tinners, The Green Book, Goldengrove and its sequel Unleaving (Boston Globe/Horn Book prize for fiction, 1976), Gaffer Samson's Luck (Smarties Prizewinner 1985) and The Emperor's Winding Sheet (Whitbread Children's Prizewinner 1974).
Knowledge of Angels, a medieval philosophical novel, was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. Other adult novels include Lapsing (about Catholic university students), A School for Lovers (a reworking of the plot of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte) The Serpentine Cave (based on a lifeboat disaster in St Ives) and A Desert in Bohemia which follows a group of characters in England and in an imaginary Eastern European country through the years between World War II and 1989.
[edit] Imogen Quy
She authored four detective stories featuring part-time college nurse Imogen Quy, based in fictional St. Agatha's College, University of Cambridge: The Wyndham Case (1993), A Piece of Justice (1995), Debts of Dishonour (2006) and The Bad Quarto (2007).
[edit] Lord Peter Wimsey
In 1998, she won acclaim for her completion of Dorothy L. Sayers' unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey - Harriet Vane novel, Thrones, Dominations. In 2002, she followed this up with another Lord Peter novel, A Presumption of Death. In 2010, she published a third, The Attenbury Emeralds.[2]
[edit] Honours
In 1996, Jill Paton Walsh received the CBE for services to literature and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In an essay on realism in children's literature, Walsh stated that realism (like fantasy) is also metaphorical, and that she would like the relationship between the reader and her characters Bill and Judie to be as metaphorical as that between "dragons and the reader's greed or courage".[3]
[edit] Family
In 1961, she married Antony Paton Walsh, now deceased; they had one son and two daughters. In 2004, she married John Rowe Townsend. Her brother is Christopher John Emile Bliss, PhD, FBA. He was Nuffield Professor of International Economics at Oxford University from 1992-2007 and a Fellow of Nuffield College from 1977-2007.
[edit] Bibliography
- Garrett, Martin (2004). Cambridge: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford: Signal Books. http://www.signalbooks.co.uk/book.php?a=1902669797. With foreword by Jill Paton Walsh
[edit] References
- ^ ...As seen by Jill Paton Walsh
- ^ The Attenbury Emeralds. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010. ISBN 978-0340995723.
- ^ Walsh, Jill Paton; Betsy Hearne, Marilyn Kaye (eds.) (1981). Celebrating Children's Books: Essays on Children's Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland. New York: Lathrop, Lee, and Shepard Books. pp. 37. ISBN 0-688-00752-X.
[edit] External links
- biography on Jill Paton Walsh's website
- Jill Paton Walsh complete bibliography to 2001 on her own website
