Friday 18 December 2015

Novelist Peter Dickinson dead

Peter Dickinson, who has died aged 88, was a prolific novelist for adults and children. He was admired by critics and readers alike and had the distinction of being the first author to receive twice the prestigious Carnegie medal, awarded annually by librarians for the year’s outstanding new children’s book. He won in consecutive years, in 1980 for Tulku and in 1981 for City of Gold and Other Stories from the Old Testament .
His first novel for children, The Weathermonger , was published in 1968, and was followed swiftly by Heartsease (1969) and The Devil’s Children(1970), all three set at the time of the “changes”; British society is rejecting machines, turning backwards towards the middle ages and embracing a dark age of ignorance, suspicion and malevolence. Good adventures brilliantly imagined unfold in each, and the structure of the trilogy — although written first, the events in The Weathermonger come at the end of the sequence — brought Dickinson great praise.
After the Changes trilogy, which was adapted for BBC television as The Changes in 1975, Dickinson kept up a phenomenal output of titles. He was admired for the originality and range of his stories and the variety of settings he explored in them. While his themes were serious and posed dilemmas designed to provoke thought in young readers, his books were never overwhelmed by issues or designed to solve problems, either those of individuals or the world in general.
Describing his approach, Dickinson said: “My purpose in writing a children’s book is to tell a story, and everything is secondary to that; but when secondary considerations arise, they have to be properly dealt with. Apart from that, I like my stories exciting and as different as possible from the one I wrote last time.”

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