Kevin Crossley-Holland
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Kevin John William Crossley-Holland (born February 7, 1941) is an English children's author and poet.
Born in Mursley, North Buckinghamshire, Holland grew up in Whiteleaf, a small village in the Chilterns. He attended Oxford University, where after failing his first exams he discovered a passion for Anglo-Saxon literature. After graduating he became the Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, and from 1972–1977, he lectured in Anglo-Saxon for the Tufts University of London program. He also taught in the Midwest of America as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at St. Olaf College, as well as Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of St. Thomas.
His writing career began when he began working as a poetry, fiction and children’s book editor for Macmillan Publishers. He later become editorial director at Victor Gollancz. He is well-known for his poetry, novels, story collections, translations such as the contemporary classic Beowulf (1982) and reinterpretations of medieval legends such as his Arthur trilogy. He also writes definitive collections of Norse myths (Viking!) and British and Irish folk-tales (The Magic Lands).
He has also written the libretti for two operas by Nicola LeFanu, The Green Children (1966) and The Wildman (1976), as well as a chamber opera about Nelson, Haydn and Emma Hamilton; and a stage play – The Wuffings (1999), as well as several collaborations with composers Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias.
His literary works have earned several awards. Storm, his novella, won the Carnegie Medal in 1985, and in 2007 was selected by judges of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children's literature as one of the ten most important children's novels of the past 70 years. The Seeing Stone (2000), the first part of the Arthur Trilogy which concluded with At the Crossing-Places (2001) and King of the Middle March (2003), won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Tir na n-Og prize and the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Bronze Medal, as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread Awards. Holland now lives on the North Norfolk coast, where he spent some of his childhood.
[edit] Arthur Trilogy
These are probably his best-known works and have been published in 22 different countries. The trilogy is composed of The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing-Places and it finishes with King of the Middle March. It is a new look at the King Arthur legends and over the course of the three books it shows Arthur's (the main character) development from a nothing to a squire and finally a knight. As well as this steady promotion, there are the normal problems a young teenage boy would face such as what girl he wants to be betrothed with and his inheritance. On top of this, he has his stone; a mysterious obsidian that shows a mirrorimage of his own life at Camelot. A follow-up to the Arthur Trilogy, Gatty's Tale, was published in 2006.
