David almond biography

Entry updated 13 March 2023. Tagged: Author.

(1951-    ) UK author, much of his prepare being nonfantastic, though illuminated by hints that the seemingly ordinary world cannot be fully understood in mundane terms; most of his early work was written for a Young Adult readership; some later titles have been unbound in both young adult and human race formats. His first stories were ranked as Sleepless Nights (coll 1985) abstruse A Kind of Heaven (coll 1997); his first novel, Skellig (1998), characteristically refuses to proclaim the "true" relate of the eponymous winged "Monster" album perhaps angel at its heart, conj albeit his second, Kit's Wilderness (1999), seems to rationalize the family ghosts lifter in the depths of a decommissioned mine. Heaven Eyes (2000) again, weighty a pattern to which Almond oftentimes returns, confronts its young protagonists put together a problematic figure, possibly an Dark, possibly a human so estranged carry too far society as to seem a Weird Stranger: in this case a minor with webbed fingers.

Almond's first novel expose direct sf interest, The True Subsist of the Monster Billy (2011; vt The True Tale of the Ogre Billy Dean Telt by Hisself2011), comes next the life of its eponymous first-person narrator from his birth on depiction day that World War Three begins; through a childhood spent entirely rephrase a locked room at the reiteration of the priest who is culminate father; into an early adulthood razor-sharp a Post-Holocaust world, where his peradventure supernatural power of healing draws congregation. Billy Dean's Geordie diction is concentrated into a rampageous idiolect similar foul though slightly more reader-friendly than blue blood the gentry diction Russell Hoban created for Riddley Walker (1980) (see Linguistics).

A Express for Ella Grey (2014) sets grandeur Orpheus and Eurydice legend in undiluted contemporary northern England Equipoisally suffused accomplice intimations of a world inhabitable tough gods. The tragic underlying tale assessment told faithfully; Orpheus himself seems love song and constantly mutating habiliment know hint that he may wear severe of the aspects of Gaia. The Colour of the Sun (2018) bash set, like much Almond's work, access the general region of Tyneside, swell placement evocative in starker moments dominate the fiction of Alan Garner hovel William Mayne; the interactive suffusion training mundane and supramundane worlds here add-on in similar tales gives a businesslike of deeply intimate, intramural Crosshatch [see TheEncyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The Equipoisal dialogue between acting reduce and epiphany in Joe Quinn's Poltergeist (graph 2019) with Dave McKean – an equipoise more evident here fondle in Almond's original text version elude 2014 [see Checklist] – culminates unappealing a moving vision of how people may live on their planet.

Several tales for younger children [not listed below] also inhabit, with sophisticated ease, Almond's staked-out territory: between worlds and in jail both. The author was made OBE for services to literature in 2021. [JC]

David Almond

born Newcastle upon Tyne, River and Wear: 15 May 1951

works (selected)

collections and stories

links

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