Curated playlist
English children's writers
- J. R. R. TolkienOn the evening of his 21st birthday, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien sat down and wrote a letter to a young woman named Edith Mary Bratt. His guardian had forbidden him from even corresponding with her until that day. Tolkien told her he had…
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold. He was a journalist who wrote poems that outlived empires, a children's author whom Henry…
- Mary ShelleyMary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on the 30th of August 1797 in Somers Town, London, and she died on the 1st of February 1851 at Chester Square. In the fifty-three years between those dates, she wrote the novel that gave the world its…
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the third oldest of 11 children, and the world would come to know him by a name he invented for himself: Lewis Carroll. That name…
- Neil GaimanNeil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman was born on the 10th of November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire, into a family whose name had been changed from Chaiman to Gaiman by his grandfather after settling in Portsmouth. By the time Gaiman was seven…
- A. A. MilneA. A. Milne taught himself to read at the age of two. That detail feels right for a man who would spend his life in thrall to words, though the books that made him famous were not the ones he cared most about writing. Alan Alexander Milne…
- Daniel DefoeDaniel Defoe died on the 24th of April 1731 in Ropemakers Alley, probably hiding from creditors, not far from where he had been born roughly seven decades earlier. He left behind little wealth, a tangle of lawsuits with the royal treasury,…
- Julie AndrewsJulie Andrews stood on a beer crate to reach the microphone. She was not yet ten years old, performing spontaneously in wartime variety shows alongside her mother and stepfather, singing solos or duets while her mother played piano. That…
- Stephen HawkingStephen Hawking spent his final years communicating at roughly one word per minute, twitching a single cheek muscle to select letters from a screen. Yet from that near-total stillness he produced papers on black hole entropy, co-developed…
- Cavan ScottCavan Scott was born on the 18th of April 1973, and by any measure his career defies easy categorisation. He has written for Doctor Who and Star Wars. He has penned comics for DC and Marvel. He has helped launch a magazine, appeared on BBC…
- John RuskinJohn Ruskin was born on the 8th of February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London, into a household where a wine importer father read Byron aloud and a devout evangelical mother drilled him through the Bible from cover to…
- Diana Wynne JonesDiana Wynne Jones was born in London on the 16th of August 1934, and by the time she died on the 26th of March 2011, she had written some of the most inventive fantasy fiction in the English language. Neil Gaiman, one of the most…
- Kevin Crossley-HollandKevin Crossley-Holland has translated a passage from Beowulf in which Grendel storms out of the mist toward the mead hall: "Then, under night's shroud, Grendel walked down from the moors. He shouldered God's anger. The evil plunderer…