Alan Garner

Alan Garner is one of the United Kingdom's best known writers for children, and since 1996 has become a successful adult novelist as well. His fiction is characterized by an interest in the interactions of history, myth, and landscape, and is largely set in rural communities, notably in the Alderley Edge area of Cheshire, where Garner has lived almost all his life. After the publication of his first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, in 1960, he became the pre-eminent figure in a movement within British children's fantasy that drew on mythological material, often Celtic in origin, and used it in contemporary settings (other writers in this tradition include William Mayne, Susan Cooper, Penelope Farmer, and latterly Jenny Nimmo