Leon Garfield

Leon Garfield FRSL (14 July 1921 – 2 June 1996) was a British author. He is best known for children's historical novels, though he also wrote for adults. He wrote more than thirty books and scripted Shakespeare: The Animated Tales for television. His retellings of Shakespeare for young readers were published as Shakespeare Stories. Garfield won the inaugural Guardian Prize for Devil-in-the-Fog, the Carnegie Medal for The God Beneath the Sea, a retelling of Greek mythology cowritten with Edward Blishen and the Whitbread Award for John Diamond. He wrote an ending for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left unfinished at the death of Charles Dickens.

Life

Garfield attended Brighton Grammar School (1932–1938) and went on to study art at Regent Street Polytechnic, but his studies were interrupted first by lack of funds for fees, then by the outbreak of World War II. He married Lena Leah Davies in April, 1941, at Golders Green Synagogue but they separated after only a few months.

After the war Garfield worked as a biochemical laboratory technician at the Whittington Hospital in Islington, writing in his spare time until the 1960s, when he was successful enough to write full-time.

In 1964 the Garfields adopted a baby girl whom they called Jane after Jane Austen, a favourite writer of both parents. They are not novels about major historical events, which are rarely depicted, or social conditions, which provide only starting points for the personal stories of the characters. In the few novels in which Garfield handles actual events he writes of them from the limited and subjective viewpoints of his characters.

The novels owe much to Charles Dickens and to Robert Louis Stevenson. The latter's Treasure Island clearly provided a model for Jack Holborn, with its shifting alliances of manipulative characters in pursuit of a treasure. Garfield also acknowledged the brothers in Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae as inspiration for the book. Beyond these specific debts, Garfield shares Stevenson's fondness for binding a relatively conservative hero to a more forceful personality outside the bounds of conventional morality. Another recurring plot line, most evident in Smith and The December Rose, in which an outcast is integrated into a supporting household, owes more to Dickens. Garfield also shares with Dickens a preference for urban settings, generally in London.

Garfield's father broke off contact with him when he divorced his Jewish wife.

Film and television Many of Garfield's books have been adapted for film or television: Devil-in-the-Fog was televised in 1968; Smith in 1970; The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris was made into a 6-part BBC serial in 1979; Black Jack was made into a feature film by Ken Loach in the same year; John Diamond was made into a BBC television series in 1981; Jack Holborn was made into the German Christmas mini-series Jack Holborn by ZDF in 1982; The Ghost Downstairs was televised in 1982; the following year, "The Restless Ghost" was included in the Dramarama:Spooky series; "Mr Corbett's Ghost" was made into a television film with Paul Scofield and John Huston in 1987. and for Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992 and 1994), a well regarded Russian animation of Shakespeare, commissioned by the Welsh Channel Four, S4C; for this he was awarded the 1995 Sam Wanamaker Award.

Awards Devil-in-the-Fog (1966) won the inaugural Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1967. The newspaper-sponsored Prize is judged by a panel of children's writers and it annually recognises one new British children's novel by an author who has not won it.

In the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, Philip Pullman praised Garfield as "someone who put the best of his imagination into everything he wrote", particularly praising The Pleasure Garden.

Selected works

Jack Holborn (1964) Devil-in-the-Fog (1966) Smith (1967) Black Jack (1968) Mister Corbett's Ghost and Other Stories (1969) The Drummer Boy (1970) The God Beneath the Sea (Longman, 1970) ‡ The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1971) The Ghost Downstairs (1972) The Golden Shadow (Longman, 1973) ‡ The Sound of Coaches (1974), illus. John Lawrence The Prisoners of September (1975) The Pleasure Garden (1976) The Confidence Man (1978) The Apprentices (1978) Bostock and Harris (1979); US title, The Night of the Comet John Diamond (Kestrel, 1980); US title, Footsteps The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Deutsch, 1980), by Charles Dickens and Garfield Fair's Fair (1981), illus. Margaret Chamberlain, picture book The House of Cards (1982) Shakespeare Stories (1985), illus. Michael Foreman The Wedding Ghost (1985) The December Rose (1986) The Empty Sleeve (1988) Blewcoat Boy (1988) Shakespeare Stories II (1994), illus. Michael Foreman

‡ The God Beneath the Sea (1970) and The Golden Shadow (1973) were written by Garfield and Edward Blishen, illustrated by Charles Keeping, and published by Longman.