Obituary: Aidan Chambers
Aidan Chambers 27 December 1934 – 11 May 2025
Aidan Chambers, who died at the age of ninety earlier this year, was a protean figure. No one working with children’s books at the end of the last century and the beginning of this could avoid bumping into him in one or more of his many guises: as teacher, lecturer, editor, publisher, critic, and, finally, a demanding and richly garlanded writer of literary fiction about and for young people. He was one of the shapers of a vigorous late twentieth century children’s book world and his life was driven by a vision of what reading and literature might mean for young people, from reluctant readers to those that are ready for the most sophisticated and challenging work.
By his own account, he came a little late to the mystery that was to consume a lifetime, becoming a fluent reader only at the age of nine. It was six years later, through an encounter with D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, that he came to understand how reading might feed an understanding of self and place in the world for himself and, by implication, anyone else. Here, too, his ambition to become a writer was born. He began his career as an English teacher and, entering an open Anglican monastic order in Stroud in Gloucestershire, took up a post there at Archway Secondary Modern School.
This was a challenge through which he discovered the two strands of a new career. His mainly working-class students had little interest in reading fiction because, he came to believe, there was nothing to read that reflected their social background or the preoccupations of their age-group. Aidan wrote novels and plays for them to read and perform. Put in charge of a new school library, he began to think about what published books might interest them. He joined the local School Library Association (SLA) and, much later, as its President (2003-2006), he remembered with gratitude how the help of local school librarians ‘had made it possible for me to learn on the job without causing irreparable damage’. He remembered too that ‘it was at local SLA meetings that I gave my first public talks, and it was as a result of my work at Archway and with the SLA that I could write my first book for teachers and librarians, The Reluctant Reader.’
The Reluctant Reader was published in 1969. By then, Aidan had left the monastery and teaching. After lobbying publishers about the needs of books for teenagers, he was editing Topliners, a new paperback imprint from Macmillan commissioning original stories. And he was married to Nancy Lockwood, the former editor of Children’s Book News. In 1970, they launched their own publishing house, Thimble Press, from their home in Stroud. For the next thirty years, three times a year, they published the journal Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books. Signal, edited by Nancy, was a source of news and literary criticism about children’s books, and the meeting place for all those in Britain who were interested in the serious discussion of books for young people. In 1979 it inaugurated the Signal Poetry Award, the first national recognition of poetry for young people, awarded annually for the next twenty years.
As the editor of Topliners for thirteen years, Aidan was one of the founders of young adult publishing. He was receptive to any theme that he thought mattered in teenagers’ lives, even if, like sexuality it might be controversial, showing as an editor some of the fearlessness that would characterise his own writing. He continued to think, write and speak about children’s books. His thoughtfulness, openness, and confident and enthusiastic delivery meant he was in constant demand as a speaker, both in this country and abroad. He returned to education by a side door in 1970, running evening courses in children’s books for newly qualified teachers for Bristol University. He spent ten years there and then ten years at Westminster College, Oxford in a similar capacity. Through these years, he developed an approach to encouraging young people to become what he called ‘literary readers’. This was a flexible, collaborative approach based on talk about books between teacher and student. It was a way of stimulating and sustaining young people’s reading, which respected the students’ responses and informally developed their critical practice. Aidan set out its elements in The Reading Environment (1991), and Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk (1993), later published together (2011).
Aidan edited Topliners until it was discontinued in 1983. In 1975, his own fiction took a great leap forward. Failing to sustain interest in a novel he had been commissioned to write, he found that instead he had begun to write something that he felt might never be published. It began with a masturbation scene and it was experimental in form, being ostensibly written by a sixth-former to convince a friend of the power of fiction. Published three years later, Breaktime (1978) was a critical success. He now felt like his own writer, no longer constrained by what a writer for teenagers might be expected to write but writing about being young with all the honesty and literary firepower he could muster. Breaktime was the first of six novels over the next thirty years, which he called ‘The Dance Sequence’, taking the name from Dance on my Grave (1982), the second in the sequence, and from his conviction that each of the books, although apparently connected only by the youth of their protagonists, are related to the others like moves in a dance. Of this ambitious project, he wrote that, ‘[the books] together paint a portrait of a certain kind of youthful life, of becoming adult in the last years of the twentieth century and the first of the new millennium.’
Aidan had an international presence early in his career, writing a regular letter from Britain for The Horn Book, the USA’s pre-eminent children’s literature magazine. He published books in translation as part of the Topliners list and in 1979, in partnership with an Australian bookshop, under the Turton and Chambers imprint, he published books in translation for the English-speaking market. Over the course of the three years of the imprint’s life, he published sixteen books, translated from French, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch, some by authors who were award-winners in their own language but largely unknown to English readers. Through the next twenty years, he received increasing international recognition as a critic, promoter of children’s reading and, perhaps most important to him, as a novelist. He was regularly invited to speak abroad. Recognition of his work reached its high point at the turn of the century. The fifth novel in The Dance Sequence, Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999), received, among other awards, the Carnegie Medal from the Youth Library Group of the British Library Association and the Michael L. Printz Award in the U.S.A. Three years later, in 2002, he received perhaps the highest international accolade given to an author for young people, the Hans Andersen Award, given for the whole body of his work by the International Board on Books for Young People. He is one of only three British winners of the award in its nearly seventy-year history.
The Dance Sequence was completed in 2005 with the over eight hundred pages of This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Klein; and Aidan then turned towards refining his thoughts about youth literature and his own connection to it. This appeared in The Age Between: Personal Reflections on Youth Fiction (2020) and, possibly, also in fictional form in Dying to Know You (2012) which features an elderly author not unlike Aidan, and his friendship with a young couple.
It is hard to estimate the extent of Aidan’s legacy. When he was given an award in 2010 for lifetime services to English education by NATE (National Association of Teachers in English) he recognised that the political and educational tide had turned against his kind of approach to reading. However, it lives on in the aspirations of many teachers. The flag is still flying at London’s Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), where he was one of a group of like-minded illustrious patrons, and CLPE has taken over the responsibility of an annual award for children’s poetry. The publishing of books for young people in translation is hardly a lonely business now. And, of course, the young adult market flourishes. It is sometimes said he was more honoured abroad than in his home country. It was not until 2020 that a film was made of any of his novels and then it was by a French director, François Ozon, Dance on My Grave (1982) becoming Été85 (Summer of 85). Most of his life he had no full-time institutional affiliation (possibly by choice), although he latterly received a number of academic and literary honours. Some of his novels are out of print and most have disappeared from my local public libraries, but they will provide rich pickings for children’s literature students for years to come. These can be only signs and tokens. For many of us who worked with books for children and young people at the end of the last century, his was the voice to which we turned for provocation, encouragement and reassurance in equal measure. If that voice is silent now, it echoes still.
Nancy, his co-conspirator in reading mischief, survives him. Their joint archive is at Seven Stories, The University of Newcastle.
The Dance Sequence: Breaktime (1978); Dance on My Grave (1982); Now I Know (1987); The Toll Bridge (1992); Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999); This is All: The Pillow Book of Cornelia Klein (2005).
Selected awards and honours: Children’s Literature Association (USA) 1979 for outstanding literary criticism; Eleanor Farjeon Award 1982, with Nancy, for outstanding services to children’s literature; The Silver Pen (Netherlands) 1983 for Seal Secret, 1986 for The Present Takers and 1994 for The Toll Bridge; The Carnegie Medal (UK) 1999 and the Michael L Prinz Award (USA) for Postcards from No Man’s Land; International Board on Books for Young People, Hans Andersen Award 2002; Honorary Doctorates from the University of Sumeä (Sweden) 2002, University of Gloucestershire 2008 and Oxford Brookes University 2011; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature 2009.
Clive Barnes has retired from Southampton City where he was Principal Children’s Librarian and is now a freelance researcher and writer.
