Berlie Doherty

Berlie Doherty (born Berlie Hollingsworth; 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. She has also written novels for adults, plays for theatre and radio, television series and libretti for children's opera.

Born at Knotty Ash in Liverpool in 1943 to Walter Hollingsworth, Doherty was the youngest of three children. All four grandparents had died before she was born, which she later called "a great deprivation". Aged four, she moved to Hoylake, the setting of several of her early books. She was encouraged to write by her father, from whom she later wrote that she had "inherited stories". 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.'"

Berlie attended Upton Hall Convent School. She read English at the University of Durham (1965), and then studied social science at the University of Liverpool. In 1978, after starting a family, she gained a postgraduate certificate in education at the University of Sheffield. A course in creative writing as part of the certificate led to a short story about the convent school; broadcast on local radio, it was to form the nucleus of Doherty's first adult novel, Requiem.

After employment as a social worker and teacher, Doherty spent two years writing and producing schools programmes for BBC Radio Sheffield. One of the series generated White Peak Farm.

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