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The fantastical English Bildungsroman with crossover appeal is nothing new: long before Harry and Hogwarts, Peake gave us Titus Groan and Gormenghast. He also gave us paintings, illustrations (including of Alice in Wonderland) poems, plays and photographs. Peake grew up in China, and Beijing’s stone bestiary and the Yangtze’s hidden gorges are as much progenitors of Gormenghast as Arundel Castle, in whose shadow he lived, and his life-changing experiences as a war artist at Belsen. The story of Gormenghast, that impossible, ritualised castle, was to have been the beginning of a much longer series, but Parkinson’s disease denied it to us. Peake’s legacy lives on not only in the Parkinson’s Society’s Mervyn Peake Award, but in his grandson, the rising musical star Jack Peñata, equally at home as an illustrator and writer.

Read: The Gormenghast trilogy (1946-59)

More about Mervyn Peake

Read a full biography and view original artwork by Peake

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