Robert Geoffrey Trease FRSL was a prolific British writer who published 113 books, mainly for children, between 1934 and 1997, starting with Bows Against the Barons and ending with Cloak for a Spy in 1997.
13 Facts About Geoffrey Trease
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Geoffrey Trease is best known for the children's novel Cue for Treason.
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Geoffrey Trease's grandfather was a historian, and was one of the main influences on his work.
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Geoffrey Trease's ground-breaking study Tales Out of School pioneered the idea that children's literature should be a serious subject for study and debate.
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Geoffrey Trease was born in Nottingham in 1909, third and youngest son of George Geoffrey Trease, a wine merchant, and his wife Florence Dale, a doctor's daughter.
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Geoffrey Trease won a scholarship to Nottingham High School, where he wrote stories, poems, and a three-act play; awarded a Classics scholarship to Oxford University, he found his tutors dull and after a year, left university without a degree and moved to London.
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Geoffrey Trease described his own childhood reading as "a diet of classist and racist historical adventure" but in 1933, he came across a translation of a Russian book titled Moscow has a Plan, in which a Soviet author dramatised the First five-year plan for young readers.
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Geoffrey Trease's subjects cover a wide range of historical periods, such as The Crown of Violet, set in Ancient Greece, The Red Towers of Granada, Middle Ages, The Hills of Varna, Renaissance Europe, Cue for Treason and Cloak for a Spy, Elizabethan England, Fire on the Wind and Popinjay Stairs, Restoration London, Thunder of Valmy, French Revolution, The White Nights of St Petersburg, the Bolshevik Revolution and Tomorrow Is a Stranger, World War II.
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Geoffrey Trease wrote modern school stories, including the five Black Banner novels set in the Lake District, the first being No Boats on Bannermere, as well as a number of adult novels, history, plays for radio and television, and biographies.
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Geoffrey Trease authored a guide aimed at teaching creative writing to young adults, The Young Writer: A Practical Handbook.
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Geoffrey Trease wrote three books of autobiography: A Whiff of Burnt Boats, Laughter at the Door, and in the last year of his life, the final part, Farewell the Hills.
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Geoffrey Trease was an acknowledged influence on author Hester Burton and inspired others, including Rosemary Sutcliff and Leon Garfield.
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Geoffrey Trease married Marian Boyer in 1933 and they spent most of their marriage in Colwall, near The Downs School, Great Malvern.