Kevin Crossley-Holland
The second half of the twentieth century saw a renewed enthusiasm in Britain for medieval literature and folklore, as writers and scholars worked to make older traditions accessible to contemporary readers. Kevin Crossley-Holland, born on 7 February 1941 in Mursley, emerged from that cultural moment as a distinctive voice working across several different forms.
Crossley-Holland was educated at Bryanston School and St Edmund Hall, and went on to build a career that's difficult to pin to a single role. He works as a poet, novelist, translator, librettist, and children's and young adult author — a range that's unusually broad even by the standards of writers who move between genres. Writing in English, and working from a base in the United Kingdom, he has produced work for both adult and younger audiences throughout his career.
His work for children and young adults has drawn particular recognition. He received the Carnegie Medal, one of the most significant awards given for children's literature in the UK, as well as the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Both honours reflect the weight that his fiction for younger readers carries within that field. His role as a librettist adds another dimension to his output, suggesting a sustained engagement with collaborative and performed forms of writing alongside his work on the page.
Crossley-Holland also holds the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, a recognition extended to writers who have made a substantial contribution to literature in English. That fellowship, combined with his Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, places him among the more formally recognized figures working across poetry, fiction, and translation in Britain. For a writer whose output spans so many forms, the consistency of that recognition across different award categories is itself a fair measure of the breadth of what he's produced.
Quotes by Kevin Crossley-Holland
Men and women expected their share of trouble and the best of them attempted to use it, to rise above it and carve out a name for themselves through bravery and loyalty and generosity.
That’s where the raiders would come from, and where Wales begins. That’s where the world starts to turn blue.
The rivers that sprang from Hvergelmir streamed into the void. The yeasty venom in them thickened and congealed like slag, and the rivers turned into ice.
Fearlessness is better than a faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.
When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.
Think of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.' It is equally intoxicating for children and adults. All this 'crossover' talk is something publishers are using as a selling device - a kind of post hoc rationalisation of what was happening already.
There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does.
Maybe if I ever come to write about my teens and adulthood - and I can't imagine I will - but if I do, then maybe I will want to say a bit more about the ways in which my parents' relationship with one another impacted on me in later years.
I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.
For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.