Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Inside Grandad

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Inside Grandad

Peter Dickinson, born in 1927, has written more than fifty novels for adults and young readers; and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Award twice.

He is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird hooting voice – in fact he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf’s crazy twin, but he's only rather absent-minded, probably because he’s thinking about something else. Day-dreaming, mostly.

He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground....
More about Dickinson, plus an essay supporting his viewpoint that children should be allowed to read 'rubbish'.

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This article relates to Inside Grandad. It first ran in the June 15, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.