Alison Prince

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Alison Prince (born 26 March 1931)[1] is a British children's writer, screenwriter and biographer now settled on the Isle of Arran in Scotland.[2][3]

Background

Alison Prince was born in Beckenham, Kent[1] (now in Greater London) and grew up in South London. She went to a girls' grammar school, where she enjoyed grammar and Latin, but not maths. Her parents were from Scotland and Yorkshire. Her father was a keen pianist, and Prince herself still plays the clarinet. As a child she enjoyed visiting Scottish relatives in Glasgow.

After completing a degree course at the Slade School of Art, where she had won a scholarship, Prince found only casual, low-paid jobs unrelated to art. She later took a postgraduate teaching diploma at Goldsmith's College, then taught art at the Elliott Comprehensive School, in Putney. She married a fellow teacher there, had three children, which interrupted her teaching career, and turned instead to occasional journalism. After the marriage collapsed, she ran a small farm in Suffolk for eight years.[4]

From television to books

Prince later moved into writing for children's television, achieving fame with the Trumpton series for pre-schoolers, first screened in 1967. Her first book was Joe and a Horse and other stories about Joe from 'Watch with Mother', with Joan Hickson, a 1968 spin-off from the BBC pre-school program Watch with Mother.[3][5][lower-alpha 1] In the late 1970s, she turned to writing books for children, some based on historical characters. They include My Royal Story about Catherine of Aragon, which was re-released in 2010. How's Business (1987), set in World War II, made the shortlist for the Nestle Smarties Book Prize.

The Sherwood Hero (1995) is a modern-day Robin Hood story for young adults, about a girl stealing a credit card from her father's client, drawing £100, attempting to hand it out to the poor in the streets of Glasgow, and then coping with the guilt. For this Alison Prince was a joint winner (with Philip Pullman) of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.[6] Her thriller Oranges and Murder was the Scottish Arts Council Children's Book of the Year in 2002.[7] Translations of her books have been published in several languages, including Danish, German, Japanese, and Welsh.[8]

Mainly for adults, Prince wrote well-received biographies of Kenneth Grahame (1994, reissued 2009) and Hans Christian Andersen (1998), a collection of essays on formative thinking,[9] two booklets of poetry,[10] and two volumes of pieces that originally appeared in a local Arran newspaper.

In 2005, Alison Prince received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Leicester for services to children's books.[3][11]

Forbidden Soldier, a children's book about the second phase of the English Civil War, appeared in 2014, as did The Lost King: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, a biography of Richard III, whose remains were dug up in 2013 in a Leicester car park.[12]

Selected works

* These titles are or have recently been available in the UK, according to the websites of major internet booksellers.

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Notes

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References

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Citations
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  • Trumpton. Episode 6 – The Mayor's Birthday (part 1; part 2). YouTube. Retrieved 25 April 2012
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External links

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Alison Prince at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). Retrieved 4 June 2013. Select a title to see its linked publication history and general information. Select a particular edition (title) for more data at that level, such as a front cover image or linked contents.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.[dead link]
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Joe and a Horse in libraries (WorldCat catalog). Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Books from Scotland site Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ The Necessary Goat (Glasgow: Taranis, 1992). Scottish Poetry Library site. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
  10. ↑ Having Been in the City (Edinburgh: Taranis, [1994]); The Whifflet Train (Mariscat Press, 2003). Scottish Poetry Society site. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Amazon listings Retrieved 11 October 2014.; author's website. Retrieved 1 December 2013.


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