Kevin Crossley-Holland is a well-known poet and prize-winning author for children. Walker will release his eagerly awaited Arthur: The Always King, illustrated by Chris Riddell, this November, and his new collection of poems, Gravity for Beginners, was published earlier this year.
The first part of Kevin’s Arthur trilogy, The Seeing Stone won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, and the trilogy itself has won worldwide critical acclaim, sold well over one million copies, and been translated into twenty-five languages. He has translated Beowulf and many of the shorter Anglo-Saxon poems, while his retellings of traditional tale include The Penguin Book of Norse Myths and Between Worlds: Folktales of Britain and Ireland. His collaborations with composers include two operas with Nicola Lefanu (The Green Children and The Wildman), song cycles and setting of carols with Sir Arthur Bliss, William Mathias and Bob Chilcott and The Girl from Aleppo written for the National Children’s Choir with Cecilia McDowall. His play The Wuffings (co-authored with Ivan Cutting) was produced by Eastern Angles in 1997.
After seven years teaching in Minnesota, where he was a Distinguished Fulbright Visiting Professor and held an Endowed Chair in the Humanities, Kevin now lives on the north Norfolk coast in East Anglia. He has a Minnesotan wife, Linda, two sons (Kieran and Dominic) and two daughters (Oenone and Eleanor). He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from both Anglia Ruskin and Worcester Universities. He is a patron of the Society for Storytelling and the Story Museum, a past President of The School Library Association (2012-2017), an ambassador for the Almshouse Association and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.