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Lloyd Alexander
Lloyd Alexander was born in Philadelphia in America in 1924.
Lloyd was an enthusiastic reader when he was a child, particularly of mythologies. He says, " King Arthur was one of my heroes; I played with a dustbin lid for a knightly shield and my uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur."
When Lloyd was 15, he told his parents that he wanted to be a writer. They were not impressed and begged him to find a "proper" job! His parents could not afford to send him to college, so he went to work at a bank in Philadelphia. However, maths was not his strong suit and he felt "like Robin Hood chained in the Sheriff of Nottingham's dungeon".
Once he'd saved enough money, he quit and went to a local college, but this didn't teach him to be a writer either so he left after one term in search of adventure and joined the US Army. This was during World War II, and after the war it took LLoyd seven years of constant rejection before his first novel was finally published.
During the next ten years, he wrote for adults before turning to books for young people. Most of his stories like The Chronicles of Prydain are fantasy novels. Lloyd believes this is just one of many ways to express attitudes and feelings about life: "My concern is how we learn to be genuine human beings. I never have found out all I want to know about writing and realize I never will. All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts. If writers learn more from their books than do readers perhaps I may have begun to learn."
Lloyd had written more than 40 books by the time he died in 2007. They include:
The Fantastical Adventures of the Invisible Boy
The High King
The Foundling and Other Tales from Prydain
The Kestrel
The Beggar Queen
The Illyrian Adventure
The El Dorado Adventure
The Drackenberg Adventure
Lloyd was an enthusiastic reader when he was a child, particularly of mythologies. He says, " King Arthur was one of my heroes; I played with a dustbin lid for a knightly shield and my uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur."
When Lloyd was 15, he told his parents that he wanted to be a writer. They were not impressed and begged him to find a "proper" job! His parents could not afford to send him to college, so he went to work at a bank in Philadelphia. However, maths was not his strong suit and he felt "like Robin Hood chained in the Sheriff of Nottingham's dungeon".
Once he'd saved enough money, he quit and went to a local college, but this didn't teach him to be a writer either so he left after one term in search of adventure and joined the US Army. This was during World War II, and after the war it took LLoyd seven years of constant rejection before his first novel was finally published.
During the next ten years, he wrote for adults before turning to books for young people. Most of his stories like The Chronicles of Prydain are fantasy novels. Lloyd believes this is just one of many ways to express attitudes and feelings about life: "My concern is how we learn to be genuine human beings. I never have found out all I want to know about writing and realize I never will. All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts. If writers learn more from their books than do readers perhaps I may have begun to learn."
Lloyd had written more than 40 books by the time he died in 2007. They include:
The Fantastical Adventures of the Invisible Boy
The High King
The Foundling and Other Tales from Prydain
The Kestrel
The Beggar Queen
The Illyrian Adventure
The El Dorado Adventure
The Drackenberg Adventure