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From The Times
January 5, 2008

Alan Garner

The 50 greatest postwar writers: 28

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Long before Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling there was a children’s author who crossed the boundaries between real and imaginary worlds — and between a young and an adult readership. Alan Garner’s writing is firmly rooted in the Cheshire landscape that remains his home and draws freely on myths and legends. His 1960 debut The Weirdstone of Brisingamen may remind readers of Tolkien but by Elidor (1965), in which a magic world spills into Manchester, his own imagination started to develop. His Carnegie medal-winner The Owl Service draws on the Mabinogion and is both a classic tale of the supernatural and an examination of adolescent emotions. Red Shift (1973) moves between the Roman era, the Civil War and the present day in another tale of adolescent nihilism. More recently he has written for adults, including Strandloper (1996).

One to read: The Owl Service (1967)

More about Alan Garner

Alan Garner on how he came to write The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

A. S. Byatt admires Garner’s The Stone Book Quartet

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