28 Facts About Alan Garner

Alan Garner was born on 17 October 1934 and is an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales.

Alan Garner wrote a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, and a third book, Boneland.

Alan Garner wrote several fantasy novels, including Elidor, The Owl Service and Red Shift.

Alan Garner was born in the front room of his grandmother's house in Congleton, Cheshire, on 17 October 1934.

Alan Garner was raised in nearby Alderley Edge, a well-to-do village that had effectively become a suburb of Manchester.

Alan Garner has stated that his family had passed on "a genuine oral tradition" involving folk tales about The Edge, which included a description of a king and his army of knights who slept under it, guarded by a wizard.

Alan Garner later remarked that as a result, he was "aware of [the Edge's] magic" as a child, and he and his friends often played there.

Alan Garner faced several life-threatening childhood illnesses, which left him bed ridden for much of the time.

Alan Garner attended a local village school, where he found that, despite being praised for his intelligence, he was punished for speaking in his native Cheshire dialect; for instance, when he was six his primary school teacher washed his mouth out with soapy water.

Alan Garner used to go jogging along the highway, and later claimed that in doing so he was sometimes accompanied by the mathematician Alan Turing, who shared his fascination for the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Alan Garner was then conscripted into national service, serving for a time with the Royal Artillery while posted to Woolwich in Southeast London.

At school, Alan Garner had developed a keen interest in the work of Aeschylus and Homer, as well as the Ancient Greek language.

Alan Garner was the first member of his family to receive anything more than a basic education, and he noted that this removed him from his "cultural background" and led to something of a schism with other members of his family, who "could not cope with me, and I could not cope with" them.

Alan Garner nevertheless felt that the academic rigour which he learned during his university studies has remained "a permanent strength through all my life".

Alan Garner had begun writing his first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley, in September 1956.

Alan Garner began a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which would be known as The Moon of Gomrath.

In 1962, Alan Garner began work on a radio play entitled Elidor, which eventually became a novel of the same name.

From 1976 to 1978, Alan Garner published a series of four novellas, which have come to be collectively known as The Stone Book quartet: The Stone Book, Granny Reardun, The Aimer Gate, and Tom Fobble's Day.

Alan Garner pays particular attention to language, and strives to render the cadence of the Cheshire tongue in modern English.

Alan Garner added that Garner's work is "intensely autobiographical, in both obvious and subtle ways".

Alan Garner has spent much time investigating the areas that he deals with in his books; writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1968, Alan Garner commented that in preparation for writing his book Elidor:.

Alan Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful.

Alan Garner makes the past numinous, terrifyingly real: anything but passed.

Alan Garner was the sole runner-up for the writing award in 1978.

Alan Garner was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature in the 2001 New Year's Honours list.

Alan Garner received the British Fantasy Society's occasional Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2003 and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2012.

Alan Garner has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Salford and the University of Huddersfield in.

Alan Garner has been recognised several times for particular works.