KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND GREW UP IN THE ENGLISH countryside at the foot of a high hill. While an undergraduate at Oxford University, he fell in love with the Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon poetry—a passion now reflected in his many highly praised collections and retellings of medieval stories and myths. In 1985, he received the Carnegie Medal for his novel Storm, while The Seeing Stone, the first book in his Arthur trilogy, won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also named an ALA Notable Book for Older Readers. The Arthur trilogy has won worldwide acclaim and is being published in twenty-one languages. It has already sold more than a million copies.
Kevin writes: “Writers, painters, composers, filmmakers, artists of all kinds have been visitors to Camelot for more than eight hundred years. If you, too, want to spend more time with some of the characters Arthur de Caldicot sees in his stone, there are dozens of ways of doing so. Some of the better Arthurian novels written during my lifetime are The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (adapted by Lerner and Loewe for Camelot and by Walt Disney); The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff; The Dark Is Rising (set in modern Britain) and other novels by Susan Cooper; Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson; and Corbenic by Catherine Fisher. When I taught in an American university, my students particularly enjoyed The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Donald Barthelme’s The King. Or how about Tennyson’s wonderful poems, Idylls of the King, and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the film Excalibur? All these works were inspired by the great medieval Arthurian romance writers; like mine, they’re new leaves on an old tree.”
Kevin and his wife, Linda, live on the coast of the North Sea in Norfolk, England.