Aidan Chambers
A constant reader, Aidan Chambers was for 11 years during the 1950s and 60s a teacher of English and drama in secondary schools, seven of them as a modern-style monk. In 1968 he became a freelance author of fiction and a writer about and speaker on reading and literature.
He is best known for a sequence of six novels of adolescence, beginning with Breaktime published in 1978 concluding with This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn published in 2005. The Carnegie Medal was awarded to the fifth book in the sequence, Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999), and in 2002 he received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for the body of his work. His books have been translated into 16 languages.
Of his writings for teachers and librarians Tell Me: Children, Reading & Talk is the most widely read, with editions in the US and Canada and translations into seven other languages. His article “The Reader in the Book” received the first Children’s Literature Association (US) award for critical writing in 1979. He has also written for many journals and newspapers, for radio and TV.
In recent years he has lectured in Sweden, Holland, Italy, Canada and Belgium, where in March 2009 he delivered a keynote speech at a European Union Conference on Cultural Education, Innovation, Creativity and Youth, organised by the Flemish Ministry of Education. He has an honorary PhD from the University of Umeå, Sweden, and a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Gloucestershire, UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Among his current writing projects is an adult antenovel and a book on the poetics of youth literature. Last year he was awarded a Hon. Doctorate of Literature from Oxford Brookes University.
