Catherine Cookson

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Dame Catherine Ann Cookson (born McMullen , born June 27, 1906 in Tyne Dock, South Shields , † June 11, 1998 at Jesmond Dene, Newcastle upon Tyne ) was an English writer . She also published under the pseudonyms Catherine Marchant and under the name of her mother Katie McMullen . She is one of the most widely read English authors of romantic prose and has sold more than 100 million copies of books worldwide.

Life

Catherine McMullen came from a poor and difficult family background. Born out of wedlock, they made their mother, Kate McMullen, and stepfather believe that she was an abandoned child and that their drunk and violent mother was their older sister. She received only a minimum of schooling. At the age of 13, she developed a rare hereditary vascular disease ( hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia ).

As a teenager she started writing short stories. At the age of eleven, she sent the short story The Wild Irish Girl to the South Shields Gazette, which she returned without comment. At the age of 13, she left school without a degree and worked as a housemaid in households of wealthy citizens. In 1924 she moved to Hastings , where she found a job in a laundry. She met the high school teacher Tom Cookson, whom she married in 1940 at the age of 34. In the following years she suffered several miscarriages and the marriage remained childless.

Career

Her first publication, meanwhile engaged in a local literary group, came about at the age of 44 with the novel Kate Hannigan , which was published in 1950 and is autobiographical . In the story, Kate, a working-class girl, becomes pregnant by an upper-middle-class man. Kate's parents raise the child, believing that Kate is the sister and she is the birth parents. The publication of the novel caused a minor scandal in Hastings. Some citizens tried to prevent the sale because Cookson describes the birth processes in detail on the opening pages.

She then concentrated on romance and social novels in the English working class and wrote more than 100 novels and short stories, two or three of which were published annually. She also wrote children's books in later years. She was considered a local writer until the late 1960s; her novella The Round Tower won the 1968 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of Literature as the best regional short story of the year, but sales exploded from the 1970s onwards. In 1988 statistics from UK lending libraries showed that around a third of all loans were a Catherine Cookson book, and a year before her death, nine of the ten most loaned books were her works.

In 1983 she received an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University . In 1993 she was ennobled by Queen Elizabeth II as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

Her total of almost 90 published novels have been translated into 12 languages, most of them also into German; some have been filmed.

Cookson was known for her humble, withdrawn life. She lived in Newcastle upon Tyne for the last few years before her death . The county of South Tyneside is still called "Catherine Cookson Country" and has created a literary hiking trail to bring visitors closer to the life and works of Catherine Cookson. A few days before her 92nd birthday, she died as one of the wealthiest women in Great Britain.

Works

Her most successful works include:

  • Kate Hannigan (1950)
  • The Fifteen Streets (1952)
  • Color Blind (1953)
  • Maggie Rowan (1954)
  • Katie Mulholland (1967)
  • The Cinder Path (1978)
  • Tilly Trotter (1978)
  • The Bailey Chronicles (1986–1990) (trilogy)
  • The Harrogate Secret (1988)
  • The Gillyvors (1990)
  • The Love Child: A Novel (1990)
  • Mallen : Trilogy (1973-74)
  • Mary Ann Series: 9 Stories (1956-1967)

In addition, she wrote a number of children's books, which also achieved high sales, including:

  • Matty Doolin (1965)
  • Joe and the Gladiator (1968)
  • The Nipper (1970)
  • Blue Baccy (1972) and Rory's Fortune (1988)
  • Our John Willie (1974)
    • German, translated by Angela Djuren: The secret in the castle . Heyne-Jugend-Taschenbücher, Munich 1976. ISBN 3-453-54117-0
  • Mrs Flannagan's Trumpet (1976)
  • Go Tell It to Mrs Golightly (1977)
  • Lanky Jones (1981)
  • Nancy Nutall and the Mongrel (1982)
  • Rory's Fortune (1988) and Blue Baccy (1972)
  • Bill and The Mary Ann Shaughnessy (1991)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kevin Pilley: Too many Cooksons. In: The Age. October 6, 2008.
  2. ↑ Routledge (Ed.): A historical dictionary of British women. Routledge Publishing, London 2003, ISBN 1-8574-3228-2 , p. 115.
  3. ^ Royal Society of Literature Awards. ( Memento of the original from June 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website The Royal Society of Literature.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rslit.org
  4. ↑ a b Clive Bloom: Bestsellers: popular fiction since 1900. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2002, ISBN 0-3336-8742-6 . P. 196f.
  5. ↑ Catherine Cookson dies. In: BBCNews. June 11, 1998.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cookson, Catherine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cookson, Catherine Ann; McMullen, Catherine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English author
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Tyne Dock, South Shields
DATE OF DEATH June 11, 1998
Place of death Jesmond Dene, Newcastle upon Tyne