Julia Donaldson
| Julia Donaldson | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Axel Scheffler and Julia Donaldson in the 2011 Children´s and Young Adult Program of the Berlin International Literature Festival
|
|||
| Born | Julia Catherine Shields 16 September 1948 London, England, UK |
||
| Occupation | Writer, playwright | ||
| Alma mater | University of Bristol | ||
| Period | 1993–present | ||
| Genre | Children's fiction, drama, and songs (retail and schools markets) | ||
| Notable works | The Gruffalo | ||
| Spouse | Malcolm Donaldson | ||
| Children | Hamish (deceased), Alastair and Jerry | ||
|
|||
| Website | |||
| www |
|||
Julia Catherine Donaldson MBE (born 16 September 1948) is an English writer, playwright and performer, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man. She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her Songbirds phonic reading scheme, which is part of the Oxford Reading Tree.
Donaldson (née Shields) was born in 1948 and brought up in Hampstead, London, with her younger sister Mary. The family occupied a Victorian three-storey house near Hampstead Heath. Her parents, sister and their pet cat Geoffrey lived on the ground floor, an aunt and uncle on the first floor and her grandmother on the second floor. Donaldson's parents, James (always known as Jerry) and Elizabeth, met shortly before the Second World War, which then separated them for six years. Jerry, who had studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, spent most of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp where his knowledge of German earned him the position of interpreter. Elizabeth, also a good German speaker with a degree in languages, meanwhile did war work in the Wrens.
After the war they were reunited and married, and in 1950 they bought the Hampstead house together with Jerry's mother, his sister Beta and her husband Chris (the two men having met in the P.O.W. camp). When Donaldson was six her father contracted polio and thereafter was confined to a wheelchair, though he still led an active life, working as a lecturer in the Maudsley Hospital's Institute of Psychiatry, where he pioneered genetic studies using the model of identical twins brought up apart.
Elizabeth worked as a part-time secretary and helped her boss, Leslie Minchin, translate German lieder into English. It was a household of music and song: Elizabeth sang with the Hampstead Choral Society, Jerry played the cello in amateur string quartets, and both parents were active members of the Hampstead Music Club. Summer holidays were at Grittleton House in Wiltshire, where Jerry played his cello in a summer school for chamber music, while Julia and Mary romped around and put on musical shows with the other children.
...
Wikipedia