Kevin Crossley-Holland

• 1. Introduction

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  Kevin 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 intended to ensnare one of the race of men in the high hall." The man behind those lines, born on the 7th of February 1941, is usually shelved as a children's author rather than a scholar of Old English verse. What turned a student of Anglo-Saxon poetry into a novelist for young readers? And what carried him from a single medieval legend into operas, folk tales, and eventually a memoir of his own childhood?

• 2. Early Life And Education

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  Mursley, a village in north Buckinghamshire, is where Crossley-Holland was born, though he grew up further on in Whiteleaf, a village tucked into the Chilterns. His father, Peter Crossley-Holland, worked as a composer and ethnomusicologist. His mother, Joan Crossley-Holland, born Joan Cowper, worked as a potter and gallerist.

  Bryanston School in Dorset gave him his early schooling, followed by St Edmund Hall at Oxford. He failed his first set of exams there, and it was in the aftermath of that setback that he discovered a passion for Anglo-Saxon literature, a subject that would hold him for the rest of his career. After graduating he became the Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, and from 1972 to 1977 he lectured in Anglo-Saxon for the Tufts University London programme. He crossed the Atlantic as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at St. Olaf College in the American midwest, and later held an Endowed Chair in Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. That academic path would soon carry him out of the lecture hall and into the editorial world, where he first made his name as a writer.

• 3. Editor And Translator

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  A desk at Macmillan gave Crossley-Holland his start, editing poetry, fiction, and children's books before he built a body of work under his own name. He later became editorial director for Victor Gollancz.

  His translation work reached back to Old English, producing three editions of Beowulf, in 1968, 1973, and 1999. He also edited and translated the riddles preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book. His retellings extended into Norse mythology with The Penguin Book of Norse Myths, and into British and Irish storytelling with The Magic Lands: Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland. In 2011 he published Bracelet of Bones, a Viking "saga", alongside a poetry collection titled The Mountains of Norfolk: New and Selected Poems. None of those translations were his most-read work; that distinction belongs to a modern reworking of a medieval legend, still to come.

• 4. The Arthur Trilogy

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  The Seeing Stone came out in 2000, followed by At the Crossing-Places in 2001 and King of the Middle March in 2003. Orion Children's Books published the three volumes in hardcover, running to almost 1,100 pages between them, and they have since appeared in 25 different languages.

  The story follows a medieval boy's progression from page to squire to knight, complicated along the way by questions of betrothal and inheritance. Through a device called the Seeing Stone, the boy watches events unfold in the early life of King Arthur, set several hundred years before his own. A follow-up novel, Gatty's Tale, appeared in 2006. That trilogy did not go unnoticed among the people who choose prizes for children's fiction in Britain.

• 5. Operas And Collaborations

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  Two operas by the composer Nicola LeFanu carry libretti written by Crossley-Holland: The Green Children in 1966 and The Wildman in 1976. He also wrote the libretto for a chamber opera centered on Nelson, Haydn, and Emma Hamilton.

  He worked repeatedly with the composers Arthur Bliss and William Mathias on other projects. In 1999 he wrote a stage play titled The Wuffings. None of these stage and opera credits carried the kind of medal recognition his prose fiction did.

• 6. Awards And Recognition

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  Storm, published by Heinemann in 1984, won Crossley-Holland the Carnegie Medal in 1985. When the Medal marked its 70th anniversary in 2007, it was named one of the top ten winning works in the prize's history.

  The Royal Society of Literature elected him a Fellow in 1998. The Seeing Stone brought a run of honors: the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award judged by a panel of British children's writers, went to Crossley-Holland for that book, along with the Tir na n-Og Award from the Welsh Books Council. Those two annual prizes single out one UK-published work of fiction by a writer who has not won before, and the best English-language book with an "authentic Welsh background". The Seeing Stone also placed as bronze runner-up for the Smarties Prize in the 9-11 age category and made the shortlist for the 2000 Whitbread Awards. Gatty's Tale later earned a place among seven books on the 2008 Carnegie shortlist. None of those prizes explain why he eventually settled on a stretch of English coastline he had known since childhood.

• 7. Life On The Norfolk Coast

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  Crossley-Holland has made his home along the North Norfolk coast, in a landscape he first knew as a child. His autobiography, The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood, was published in 2009, tracing that early terrain in prose. In 2012 he took up the honorary post of President of the School Library Association, a role that put a lifelong translator of old stories in a position to encourage new readers toward books not yet written.