Peter Rushforth

Peter Scott "PS" Rushforth (born February 15, 1945 in Gateshead , County Durham , † September 25, 2005 in Blakey Ridge , North Yorkshire ) was a British teacher and writer who was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1979 for his debut novel kindergarten has been.

Life

Rushforth, who grew up in Leeds , studied English at the University of Hull after attending Cockburn High School and graduated with a bachelor's degree . He then completed a postgraduate course in education at the University of Nottingham with a diploma and was an English teacher at Huddersfield New College for four years before he switched to the Friends's School in Great Ayton as a teacher.

While there, he studied the Holocaust after finding letters from several desperate Jewish parents who unsuccessfully pleaded for their children to be accepted as refugees in the UK prior to World War II . Although Rushforth had no family connections to the terrible events in the German Reich from 1933 to 1945 , he was neither a Jew nor had any of his relatives died, he wrote his first novel in 1979 under the name PS Rushforth with Kindergarten and immediately became one of them awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize.

Due to his work as a teacher and head of the English department at Friends's School, however, the writing work took a back seat. It was not until 1994, after a trip to Brazil with friends, that he wrote a 28,000-word manuscript for a second novel and said that his friends “had left him for a month on a mountain with nothing to do but write” ('left me on a mountain for a month with nothing to do but write '). However, it took until 2002 when he made a fifteenth draft of a new novel from it, which appeared in 2004 under the title Pinkerton's Sister . This 700-page novel, narrated by the self-proclaimed "Attic Crazy" Alice Pinkerton, received worldwide attention and was among other things Book of the Month in South Africa , where a book review valued by Rushforth began with the words, "This is not a book for everyone ... ”('This is not a book for everyone...').

Most recently, at the time of his death, he was working on his third novel, A Dead Language .

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Rushforth in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry (librarything.com)
• THE INDEPENDENT: Peter Rushforth: Prize-winning author of "Kindergarten" (obituary, October 11, 2005)