Berlie Doherty

Berlie Doherty (born 6 November 1943) is an English novelist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. She is best known for children's books, for which she has twice won the Carnegie Medal. All four grandparents had died before she was born, which she later called "a great deprivation". A railway clerk by trade, he was also a keen writer whose poetry had been published in the local newspaper. Doherty soon followed suit, with her poetry and stories appearing on the children's pages of the Liverpool Echo and Hoylake News and Advertiser from age five. Her first submitted stories and poems were typed by her father, and he nourished her dream to be a writer, as she recalled in 2004: "I cherished the dream, but it was my father who nourished it. He used to tell me bedtime stories every night, and very often we would make them up together, tossing the ideas backwards and forwards like a bright ball. Then he would drop the ball—'I've had enough now', he would say, '... you can finish that for yourself.'" Several of the series generated later publications: How Green You Are: The Making of Fingers Finnigan; Children of Winter; Tilly Minst Tales: Granny was a Buffer Girl and White Peak Farm... Next year she became a full-time writer.

White Peak Farm (1984) was Doherty's third book and her first for older readers, featuring life on a contemporary family farm and its recent changes. One reviewer called it autobiographical but her only farm experience had been work for one of the Sheffield schools radio series, when she had interviewed farm teenagers in Derbyshire, where she set the novel. (Later she moved into a 300-year-old farm cottage in the Derbyshire Peak District, in the midst of farming but not as a farmer.) Her books encompass multiple genres. Some draw on her experience as a social worker to dramatise contemporary issues, including teenage pregnancy in Dear Nobody (1991), adoption in The Snake-Stone (1995), and African AIDS orphans and child trafficking in her latest novel, Abela: The Girl Who Saw Lions (2007). A conservationist, her story book Tilly Mint and the Dodo (1988) centres on the threat of species extinction. Spellhorn (1989) uses a fantasy setting to explore the experience of blindness. Several of her works have historical settings, such as Street Child (1993), which is set in 1860s London and Treason, set in Henry VIII's reign. Some of them are based on Doherty's own family history; Granny Was a Buffer Girl (1986) includes the story of her parents' marriage, while The Sailing Ship Tree (1998) draws on the lives of her father and grandfather. She now lives in Edale, Derbyshire in the Dark Peak, and many of her books like 'Jeannie of White Peak Farm', are set in the Peak District. Children of Winter (1985) is loosely based on the story of the plague village of Eyam, and the drowning of the villages of Derwent and Ashopton by the Ladybower Reservoir is recounted in Deep Secret (2004). The fantasy picture book Blue John (2003) was inspired by the Blue John Cavern at Castleton.

Doherty often works with children and teenagers when developing her novels, having "a conviction that children are the experts and I can always learn from them." Her poem "Here lies a city's heart ...", a Sheffield Arts commission, has been engraved on a Sheffield pedestrian shopping street, since transferred to a bench in the same area.

Drama

Doherty has written many plays for radio, which she describes as "a wonderful medium to write for, inviting as it does both writer and listener to use their imaginations, to 'see' with their mind's eye." Daughter of the Sea was adapted from her novel of the same name, and was first performed at Sheffield Crucible Theatre, musicians including the Lindsay String Quartet in 2004, with music composed by Richard Chew. Her most recent libretto, for the chamber opera Wild Cat, was also commissioned by the Welsh National Opera as part of the trilogy 'Land, Sea, Sky' on the theme of conservation, and was first performed in May 2007 by the WNO Singing Club (a youth group), directed by Nik Ashton. The libretto was partly translated into Welsh by poet Menna Elfyn, and the music was also composed by Philips.

Three commissions from the Lindsay Quartet were written to be read over live performances of their music. The Midnight Man was inspired by Debussy's Quartet in G minor, Blue John by Smetana's string quartet From My Life, and The Spell of the Toadman by Janáček's string quartet Kreutzer Sonata. Doherty's daughter, Sally, has also set The Midnight Man for spoken and singing voices, flute, clarinet, cello and harp. Dear Nobody also won a 1994 Sankei Award in its Japanese edition and a 1991 Writers' Guild Award in its adaptation. The Guardian named it one of five "Classics for young teens" that were in print October 2001.

Other awards include a Writers' Guild Award for Daughter of the Sea in 1997. as the best English-language children's book that did not a major award when it was originally published twenty years earlier. The Phoenix Award is named for the mythical bird phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes, to suggest the book's rise from obscurity. and Tilly Mint and the Dodo; and Daughter of the Sea to music.