Posted in Criticism, Reviews, Research, Awards, Warrior Scarlet, tagged authors on 26/02/20152015 | Leave a Comment »
In the summer of 2009, The Daily Telegraph newspaper asked children’s writers and critics what books they would recommend for holiday reading. Acclaimed author Philip Reeve urged what he called classics, by Rosemary Sutcliff.
Source: The Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2009
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Posted in Criticism, Reviews, Research, Awards, General, Warrior Scarlet on 04/06/20122012 | Leave a Comment »
The sharing of storytelling that writers do with readers is the dialogue of imagination. Rosemary Sutcliff lives, grows and acts and suffers in her stories. The worlds created in her imagination have had to stand in for the world of much everyday actuality. From her therefore we can learn what the imagination does, and how it allows us all to explore what’s possible, the realm of virtual experience.
In Rosemary Sutcliff’s world, heroes, heroines and readers alike walk a head taller than usual, as heroic warriors, to confront, like Drem in Warrior Scarlet, fearsome events as rites of passage and thus discover what is worth striving for. Readers have to expect to be spellbound in the tradition of storytelling that’s much older than reading and writing, when before the days of written records bards and minstrels were entrusted with the memory of a tribe. Rosemary Sutcliff is in this tradition; she says of herself that she’s `of the minstrel kind’. This in itself sets her apart from some of the more, apparently, throwaway casualness of some contemporary writing. In these days, when we’ve learned to look closely at the constructedness of narratives, she will still say that she knows when a story is `in’ her and `waiting to be told’.
Posted in Criticism, Reviews, Research, Awards, Influence and Inspiration, The Eagle of the Ninth Book, Warrior Scarlet, tagged historical fiction on 20/05/20122012 | Leave a Comment »
Australian writer Nansi Kunze wrote at Michael Pryor’s blog about her “favourite book”, Rosemary Sutcliff’s Warrior Scarlet. The author of Dangerously Placed (‘Can a hippy chick, a goth girl in a lab coat and two guys with a taste for blowing things up really help solve the mystery – before Alex becomes the next victim?’) and Mishaps (‘Why does Pen’s name strike terror into the heart of pop princess Sereena? And just how far will Pen go to get what she deserves?’), grew up in both Australia and the UK.
I think I must have been ten when I began to read Rosemary Sutcliff’s books. It was a strange time for me – a confusing and somewhat lonely one. My parents had split up, and we had gone back to England, leaving my friends, my school and the various treasures a ten-year-old deems precious behind in Australia. (more…)
Posted in Criticism, Reviews, Research, Awards, Warrior Scarlet, tagged children’s literature, historical fiction, writing on 30/04/20122012 | Leave a Comment »
Margaret Meek paid tribute to Rosemary Sutcliff in her 70th year with an insightful reflection on her personality and her work. (Margaret Meek wrote a monograph about Rosemary Sutcliff in the 1960s).
The sharing of storytelling that writers do with readers is the dialogue of imagination. Rosemary Sutcliff lives, grows and acts and suffers in her stories. The worlds created in her imagination have had to stand in for the world of much everyday actuality. From her therefore we can learn what the imagination does, and how it allows us all to explore what’s possible, the realm of virtual experience. (more…)
Posted in Criticism, Reviews, Research, Awards, Warrior Scarlet, tagged children’s literature, disability, historical fiction, History on 02/02/20122012 | Leave a Comment »
Imogen Russell Williams wrote last year that “for me the nonpareil of children’s historical fiction remains Rosemary Sutcliff”:
Historical fiction for adults ranges in stature from the Booker-winning to the bodice-ripping – scholarly rambles or gleeful romps through a past animated, elucidated, or (at worst) knocked together into an unconvincing stage set by the writer’s imagination. The label carries its own baggage, however; like “crime”, or “fantasy”, sticking “historical” before “fiction” might, for some snobbish and deluded readers, require an “only” to complete the description.
It’s my feeling that historical fiction for children suffers less from the snootiness sometimes attracted by grown-up writing in the genre, perhaps because the educational cachet outweighs the sense that a “made-up” book is less worthwhile than a collection of primary sources. Certainly the best historical fiction of my childhood has remained with me, (more…)
Posted in The Eagle of the Ninth Book, Warrior Scarlet, tagged children’s books, children’s literature, historical fiction, young adult fiction on 29/01/20122012 | Leave a Comment »
The Eagle of the Ninth and Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff (are one of my favourite books) … or I could have chosen Knight’s Fee, or The Lantern Bearers, or Sun-horse, Moon-horse, or Frontier Wolf … Rosemary Sutcliff is one of my favourite children’s authors, and I doubt she ever wrote a bad book, but these were the two I liked best when I was growing up. (more…)
