Ian Serraillier

Ian Serraillier (24 September 1912 – 28 November 1994) was an English novelist and poet. He retold legends from England, Greece and Rome, and was best known for his children's books, especially The Silver Sword (1956), a wartime adventure story that the BBC adapted for television in 1957 and again in 1971.

Serraillier was born in London on 24 September 1912. He was the eldest of the four children of Lucien Serraillier (1886–1919) and Mary Kirkland Rodger (1883–1940). His father died as a result of the 1918 flu pandemic.

Serraillier was educated at Brighton College and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and he taught English at Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire from 1936 to 1939, at Dudley Grammar School in Worcestershire from 1939 to 1946, and at Midhurst Grammar School in West Sussex from 1946 to 1961. As a Quaker he was granted conscientious objector status in World War II. Serraillier was a member of the Peace Pledge Union.

In 1946, he published his first two children's books: They Raced for Treasure, a story of sailing, treasure and spies, and Thomas and the Sparrow. These were followed by several more adventure stories, including his best known work, The Silver Sword (1956). This brings to life the story of four refugee children, three of them siblings: Ruth, Edek, and Bronia. The fourth, Jan, is another of the many Warsaw war orphans who has somehow met their father and then fainted near the bombed-out basement that serves as the siblings' home. The four join together in their search for the siblings' parents in the chaos of Europe, immediately after the Second World War. In the United States the book was published under the title Escape from Warsaw.

Beginning in 1961, Serraillier devoted most of his time to writing fiction and non-fiction, poems, and educational programmes for television. He also produced his own retellings of classic and ancient legends for children, in prose and verse, including Beowulf, works by Chaucer, English folklore, and Greek and Roman myths. In 1948, together with his wife, Anne Margaret Rogers, he founded the New Windmill Series, published by Heinemann Educational Books, which set out to provide inexpensive editions of good stories, including fiction, travel and biography for older readers. He continued as co-editor of the series until the onset of Alzheimer's disease in the early 1990s.

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