Kevin John William Crossley-Holland arrived in the world on the 7th of February 1941. He grew up in Whiteleaf, a quiet village nestled within the Chilterns hills of north Buckinghamshire.
The year 1968 marked Crossley-Holland's entry into serious literary translation with his edition of Beowulf published by Macmillan. A second edition appeared in 1973 through the Folio Society while the third edition arrived much later in 1999 edited by Heather O'Donoghue and published by Oxford University Press.
Orion Children's Books released the first volume titled The Seeing Stone in 2000 followed by At the Crossing-Places in 2001 and King of the Middle March concluding the series in 2003. For The Seeing Stone he won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize judged annually by a panel of British children's writers and earned the Tir na n-Og Award from the Welsh Books Council for its authentic Welsh background.
Crossley-Holland received the Carnegie Medal in 1985 for his novella Storm published by Heinemann in 1984. In 2007 British librarians named that same novella one of the top ten winning works during the medal's 70th anniversary celebration.
His autobiography The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood was published in 2010 reflecting on those early years near the coast. Other poetry volumes followed such as The Breaking Hour in 2015, Veering North-Easterly in 2016, Seahenge: A Journey arrived in 2019 while Gravity for Beginners came out in 2021.