Books For Keeps
  • Home
  • Reviews
  • Articles
  • Past Issues
  • Latest Issue
  • Authors and Artists
  • Latest News
  • Search
  • Menu Menu
September 1, 1996/in Obituary /by Angie Hill
This article is featured in BfK 100 September 1996
This article is in the Obituary Category

Obituary: Leon Garfield

Author: Chris Powling

LEON GARFIELD

14 July 1921 – 2 June 1996

A twentieth-century children’s author with a nineteenth-century prose style who was at his best, perhaps, with narratives set in the eighteenth century? Yet who could also accommodate Greek myths, television scripts, Shakespeare for animated cartoons and the final chapters of The Mystery of Edwin Drood which Dickens left unfinished? Leon Garfield was a writer’s writer, completely himself but a warm and discerning admirer of his literary predecessors.

He was a late starter so far as publication was concerned – his debut, at the age of 43, being Jack Holborn (1964) which Grace Hogarth at Constable spotted was a children’s book, not the adult adventure story its author intended. After this, the years of rejection-slips, while working as a laboratory technician in a London hospital, paid off steadily and handsomely: The Guardian Award for Devil in the Fog (1969), the Carnegie Medal (with Edward Blishen) for The God Beneath the Sea (1971) and the Whitbread Award for John Diamond (1980).

As a stylist, he was spectacular – his lush, vigorous approach to language, reinforced by a startling use of simile and metaphor. He combined narrative pace, often linking the comic and the macabre, with a glorious ability to stop readers in their tracks at a carefully deployed phrase or sentence. Probably everyone who knows his work has a favourite Garfield passage – from The Pleasure Garden (1976) or The Apprentices (1978) or The Wedding Ghost (1987) or Revolution! (1989) -but my own favourite opens Smith (1967):

‘He was called Smith and was twelve years old. Which, in itself, was a marvel: for it seemed as if the smallpox, the consumption, brain fever, gaol-fever and even the hangman’s rope had given him a wide berth for fear of catching something. Or else they weren’t quick enough …’

Vintage Garfield.

In his BfK Authorgraph (March 1982) he told us ‘I’m creating a place in which my stories happen, not a time. I’ve looked back rather than forward because my imagination needs hard fact to shape and confine it. The historical novel does allow you to look at things which you might take for granted around you in a new perspective, and then you see how monstrous they are.’

Dip into the work of Leon Garfield almost anywhere and you’ll see how magnificent he was.

Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on WhatsApp
  • Share on Pinterest
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share on Reddit
  • Share by Mail
http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/bfklogo.png 0 0 Angie Hill http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/bfklogo.png Angie Hill1996-09-01 09:05:352021-12-08 14:41:13Obituary: Leon Garfield
BfK 254 May 2022 Download BfK Issue BfK 254 May 2022
Skip to an Issue:

Related Articles

Obituary: Shirley Hughes
BfK 253 March 2022
Obituary: Victor Ambrus
BfK 247 March 2021
Obituary: Jill Paton Walsh
BfK 245 November 2020
Obituary: Alec Davis
BfK 245 November 2020
Obituary: Wendy Cooling
BfK 244 September 2020
Obituary: Emma Langley
BfK 244 September 2020
Obituary: Margaret Meek Spencer
BfK 242 May 2020
Obituary: Albert Uderzo
BfK 241 March 2020

About Us

Launched in 1980, we’ve reviewed hundreds of new children’s books each year and published articles on every aspect of writing for children.

Read More

Follow Us

Latest News

Peter Bently and Steven Lenton named winners of The Children’s Book Award 2022

June 27, 2022

Shortlist for the 2022 SLA Information Book Award

June 23, 2022

2022 Yoto Carnegie Greenaway Winners Announced

June 16, 2022

Contact Us

Books for Keeps,
30 Winton Avenue,
London,
N11 2AT

Telephone: 0780 789 3369

ISSN: 0143-909X (this is our International Standard Serial Number).

© Copyright 2022 - Books For Keeps | Proudly Built by Lemongrass Media - Web Design Buckinghamshire
Remembering Eleanor Farjeon BfK News: September 1996
Scroll to top