Abstract

Aidan Chambers will talk about how criticism has helped form his fiction, and how writing fiction has influenced his criticism. He believes that criticism is a literary art, which, at its best, equals the best of literary writing. He also believes that literature depends on the quality of criticism for its development and renewal. Both have influenced his teaching in secondary school, undergraduate, and in-service courses.

Mr Chambers is best known for a sequence of six novels of adolescence, beginning with Breaktime _published in 1978 and concluding with _This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, published in 2005. The Carnegie Medal was awarded to the fifth book in the sequence, Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999), and in 2002 he received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for the body of his work. His books have been translated into sixteen languages. Of his writings for teachers and librarians Tell Me: Children, Reading & Talk is the most widely read, with editions in the US and Canada and translations into seven other languages. His article The Reader in the Book received the first Children’s Literature Association (US) award for critical writing in 1979.