Aidan Chambers
About Author
'I will not write books that sell young people short. What I write is intended to make people think.'
Aidan Chambers was born in Chester-le-Street in 1934 and moved to Darlington when he was ten. He started writing at the age of fifteen because he 'couldn't help it' but was not published until he was thirty. By then, he says, he had 'found the real audience I wanted to talk to myself at sixteen and a half.' After two years of national service Aidan trained as a teacher and taught for eleven years before becoming a full-time writer. He now lives in Gloucestershire and divides his time between writing, teaching and lecturing in Australia, the USA and Europe.
Aidan's novels take teenage readers into new territory in terms of both plot and style. They are some of the most challenging and satisfying available for teenagers.
Aidan is an authority on children's literature. In 1969, he and his wife Nancy founded The Thimble Press and launched Signal magazine in 1970. In 1982, Aidan and Nancy jointly won the prestigious Eleanor Farjeon Award for their work on behalf of children's books.
In 2002, Aidan won the prestigious IBBY Hans Christian Andersen Award for fiction. This award is the highest international recognition given to creators of children's books, presented every two years to an author and illustrator whose complete works have made an important and lasting contribution to children's literature. Aidan Chambers is the first British author to have won the award for fiction since Eleanor Farjeon in 1956. In 2005 Aidan was longlisted for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the second largest international literary prize in the world.
In 2005, his novel, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, was published. In This is All, 19 year old Cordelia compiles the story of her teenage years to give to her as yet unborn daughter. Choosing the old and famous Japanese pillow book as her model she is able to include all kinds of writing she has done in the past, as well as episodes and thoughts, lists and poems, she writes now.
Aidan's novel Postcards From No Man's Land, winner of the Carnegie Medal in July 2000 and the Italian Anderson Award in June 2001, received massive critical acclaim.
This is All is the sixth and final novel in a sequence in which each book explores a different aspect of contemporary adolescence. Starting with Breaktime in 1978, Adian followed it with Dance on My Grave, Now I Know, The Toll Bridge and Postcards from No Man's Land.
Author link
http://www.aidanchambers.co.uk/
Interview
No review available yet.
