Kevin Crossley-Holland
Kevin Crossley-Holland
is a prize-winning writer for children, a well-known poet and author of a memoir of childhood,The Hidden Roads. His new books this year are , Bracelet of Bones, Short Too! and his new and selected poems The Mountains of Norfolk.
Storm was awarded the Carnegie Medal and The Seeing Stone won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, the Smarties Prize Bronze Medal, and the Tir na n-Og Award. The Arthur trilogy has won worldwide critical acclaim and has been translated into twenty-five languages and its successor, Gatty's Tale was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
Crossley-Holland has translated Beowulf from the Anglo-Saxon, and his retellings of traditional tale include The Penguin Book of Norse Myths and British Folk Tales (reissued as The Magic Lands). His collaborations with composers include two operas with Nicola Lefanu (The Green Children and The Wildman); song cycles with Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias, settings by Giles Swayne and Bernard Hughes, and a carol with Stephen Paulus for King’s College, Cambridge.His play The Wuffings (co-authored with Ivan Cutting) was produced by Eastern Angles in 1997.
He has often lectured abroad on behalf of the British Council, regularly leads sessions for teachers and librarians, and visits many primary and secondary schools. He offers poetry and prose workshops and talks on the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, King Arthur, heroines and heroes, and myth, legend and folk-tale.
After seven years teaching in Minnesota, where he held an Endowed Chair in the Humanities, Kevin Crossley-Holland now lives on the north Norfolk coast in East Anglia.
He has a Minnesotan wife, Linda, two sons (Kieran and Dominic) and two daughters (Oenone and Eleanor). He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a patron of the Society for Storytelling, Publishing House Me, and the European Storytelling Archive, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Philip Pullman says...
'...as bright and as vivid as pictures in a Book of Hours. Deep scholarship, high imagination, and great gifts of storytelling have gone into this; I was spellbound.'
The Seeing Stone