Aidan Chambers – Year of election 2009

Aidan Chambers was a teacher and a monk when his first books, plays for children, were published in the late 1960s. His novels for young adults include Dance on My Grave (1982) and Postcards from No Man’s Land, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1999. With his wife, Nancy, he started the Thimble Press, which for more than 30 years published Signal, a remarkable magazine devoted to the business and practice of children’s literature, and for more than 20 years organised an annual award for poetry for children. Nancy and Aidan Chambers were presented with a joint Eleanor Farjeon Award in 1982. In 2002 Aidan Chambers was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for his lifetime’s work – the first English writer so honoured since Eleanor Farjeon.

Chambers’s books have been translated into 16 languages, and he continues to write. Accepting a prize in Toronto a few years ago, he read out an email he had received from a 15-year-old: “Mr Chambers. Our teacher made us read your book Postcards from No Man's Land. I now have to write about it. I was surprised to learn from your website that you are still alive. But I have also worked out that you are old enough to retire. Does this mean I will not have to read any more of your books?” Chambers replied that it now took him so long to finish a novel that by the time the next one appeared the boy would be too old to be made to read it.