Penelope Farmer

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Penelope Jane Farmer (born June 14, 1939 in Westerham , Kent ) is a British author who, in addition to some novels for adults, is best known for her children's books .

Life

Penelope Farmer was born in 1939 in Westerham, Kent, to Hugh Robert MacDonald and Penelope Boothby Farmer and has an older twin sister and an older brother and a younger sister. After attending a private school she began studying history at St Anne's College of Oxford University , where she graduated 1960th She then studied social sciences at Bedford College in London , for which she received a diploma in 1962. Between 1961 and 1963 she also worked as a teacher in London. Penelope Farmer has two children from her first marriage from 1962 to 1977, and in 1984 she remarried. Today she lives alternately in London and the Canary Islands .

Penelope Farmer, her mother and sisters have BRCA1 cancer; her mother and twin sister died from it. Penelope Farmer has dealt with both the life with cancer and the identity issues resulting from the twin existence in her work.

Services

Penelope Farmer has devoted most of her life to writing books. In 1960 she published The China People, a collection of fairy-tale short stories for children. With The Summer Birds , the first cohesive children's book appeared in 1962, in which the sisters Emma and Charlotte Makepeace appear for the first time , who also play a central role in their subsequent works Emma in Winter and Charlotte Sometimes . The Summer Birds was nominated for the Carnegie Medal in 1963 . The story Charlotte Sometimes , published in 1969, about the journey through time of thirteen-year-old Charlotte Makepeace, is Penelope Farmer's best-known work to this day. The book gained notoriety not least because of the song of the same name by the English band The Cure from 1981, the text of which consists mostly of literal passages from the book. Farmer also published some books with mythological content, mainly from Greek mythology .

Works

  • The China People (1960)
  • The Summer Birds (Aviary Hall Trilogy; 1962, German 1966)
  • Magic Stone (1964)
  • Emma in Winter (Aviary Hall Trilogy; 1966)
  • Sea Gull (1966)
  • Charlotte Sometimes (Aviary Hall Trilogy; 1969, German 2014)
  • Serpent's Teeth: The Story of Cadmus (1971)
  • Daedalus and Icarus (1971)
  • Story of Persephone (1972)
  • A Castle of Bone (1972)
  • William and Mary (1974)
  • August the Fourth (1975)
  • Heracles (1975)
  • Year King (1977)
  • Beginnings: Creation Myths of the World (1978)
  • Standing in the Shadow (1984)
  • Away from Home (1987)
  • Eve: Her Story (1988)
  • Glasshouses (1989)
  • Snakes and Ladders (1993)
  • Thicker Than Water (1993)
  • Two, or: The Book of Twins and Doubles (1996)
  • Penelope: A Novel (1996)
  • Sisters: An Anthology (1999)
  • Virago Book of Grandmothers (2000)
  • Lifting the World (2007)
  • Goodnight Ophelia (2015)

literature

  • A. Hedblad: Farmer, Penelope (Jane) 1939- . In: Something About the Author . Vol. 105, 1999, pp. 64-68. ISSN  0885-6842 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Author information in Charlotte Sometimes . New York Review of Books, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-59017-221-6 .
  2. ↑ Penelope Farmer: "May 8th 2015," in Life within Fiction. Blog, May 8, 2015. Accessed May 21, 2015.
  3. ↑ Penelope Farmer: "The Cure (d)." In Granny p's rockpool in the kitchen. Blog, June 9, 2007. Accessed May 21, 2015.
  4. ^ Contributor biographical information for Charlotte sometimes / by Penelope Farmer of the Library of Congress
  5. ^ List according to the online catalog of the Library of Congress
  6. ↑ a b Currently (May 2015) not yet in the online catalog of the Library of Congress; see. instead Amazon for Lifting the World and Goodnight Ophelia . The text on Lifting the World can also be found online .
personal data
SURNAME Farmer, Penelope
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Farmer, Penelope Jane (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British author
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Westerham , Kent