Jamila Gavin

Last updated

Jamila Gavin

Born (1941-08-09) August 9, 1941 (age 83)
Mussoorie, British India
OccupationAuthor
NationalityBritish
Notable works Coram Boy (2000)
Notable awards Whitbread Children's Book Award (2000)

Jamila Gavin MBE FRSL (born 9 August 1941) is a British writer who is known mainly for children's books, including several with Indian contexts.

Contents

Life

Gavin was born on 9 August 1941 in Mussoorie in the United Provinces of India, in the present-day state of Uttarakhand in the Western Himalayas. [1] Her Indian father and English mother had met as teachers in Iran. [2] She learned to describe herself as "half and half".[ citation needed ] She says online that from her mixed background "I inherited two rich cultures which ran side by side throughout my life, and which always made me feel I belonged to both countries."[ citation needed ]

Gavin first visited England when she was six and settled there when she was 11.[ citation needed ] As an adult she worked in the music department of the BBC before becoming a writer.[ citation needed ] She wrote her first book, The Magic Orange Tree and Other Stories, in 1979. After her first child was born, she became aware that there were few children's books reflecting the experience of multi-racial children.[ citation needed ] She has also written books reflecting her childhood in India, particularly her Surya trilogy.[ citation needed ]

Gavin is a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that allows schoolchildren across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres. [3]

Gavin settled in Stroud, Gloucestershire before 1990 and was still living there in 2012. [4] In 2016, she became one of the founders of the Stroud Book Festival, [5] together with Cindy Jefferies. [6] [ circular reference ] [7]

Writer

The Surya trilogy – The Wheel of Surya (1992), The Eye of the Horse (1994) and The Track of the Wind (1997) – is a family saga that follows two generations of Indian Sikhs and shows the impact of the British Empire and the Partition of India on their lives. All three books made Guardian Children's Fiction Prize shortlists; The Wheel of Surya was special runner-up.

Coram Boy won the 2000 Whitbread Prize as Children's Book of the Year. It is set in the 18th century, being based on the Foundling Hospital established in London by sea Captain Thomas Coram. According to a local newspaper, the story "has links to Gloucestershire." [8] Coram Boy has been adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson and produced by the Royal National Theatre in 2005–2006, garnering Edmundson an Olivier Award. [9] [10] It also ran on Broadway in 2007.

Three Indian Goddesses and Three Indian Princesses are collections of short stories based around Indian legends. Nine other short stories were collected as The Magic Orange Tree and Other Stories .

Grandpa Chatterji is a series for younger children, named after its first book, which was adapted for television in 1997. [11] Other books in the series are Grandpa Chatterji's Third Eye and Grandpa's Indian Summer. The first book made the Smarties Prize shortlist for reader ages 6–8. [2]

Jamila Gavin has also written The Robber Baron's Daughter, Forbidden Memories, I Want to be An Angel, Kamla and Kate, Someone's Watching, Someone's Waiting, The Hideaway and The Wormholers.

Awards and honours

Gavin became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015. [12] In the 2024 King's Birthday Honours, she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, for services to children's literature. [13]

Awards for Gavin's writing
YearTitleAwardResultRef.
1992The Wheel of Surya Guardian Children's Fiction Prize Shortlist [1]
1994The Eye of the Horse Guardian Children's Fiction Prize Shortlist [1]
1997The Track of the Wind Guardian Children's Fiction Prize Shortlist [1]
2000 Coram Boy Whitbread Children's Book Award Winner [14]
2001The God at the GateRichard Imison Memorial AwardShortlist [1] [15]
2014Blackberry BlueNeustadt Prize for Children's LiteratureFinalist [16]

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruskin Bond</span> Indian novelist and short story writer (born 1934)

Ruskin Bond is an Indian author. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, was published in 1956, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957. Bond has authored more than 500 short stories, essays, and novels which includes 69 books for children. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives with his adopted family in Landour, Mussoorie, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Anita Desai, is an Indian novelist and Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London. Since 2020 she has been a Companion of Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raja Rao</span> Indian-American English writer

Raja Rao was an Indian-American writer of English-language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide-ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literature, as well as World literature as a whole.

Sally Jane Morgan is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Her works are on display in numerous private and public collections in Australia and around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chetan Anand (director)</span> Hindi film producer, screenwriter and director

Chetan Anand was a Bollywood film producer, screenwriter and director from India, whose first film, Neecha Nagar, was awarded the Grand Prix Prize at the first ever Cannes Film Festival in 1946. Later, he co-founded Navketan Films with his younger brother Dev Anand in 1949.

<i>Coram Boy</i> 2000 childrens novel by Jamila Gavin

Coram Boy is a 2000 children's novel by Jamila Gavin. It won Gavin a Whitbread Children's Book Award.

Gary Blackwood is an American author who is known for The Shakespeare Stealer trilogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. Walter Hodges</span> English artist and illustrator 1909–2004

Cyril Walter Hodges was an English artist and writer best known for illustrating children's books and for helping to recreate Elizabethan theatre. He won the annual Greenaway Medal for British children's book illustration in 1964.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anita Nair</span> English-language Indian novelist

Anita Nair is an Indian novelist who writes her books in English. She is best known for her novels A Better Man, Mistress, and Lessons in Forgetting. She has also written poetry, essays, short stories, crime fiction, historical fiction, romance, and children's literature, including Muezza and Baby Jaan: Stories from the Quran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shreekumar Varma</span>

Shreekumar Varma is an Indian author, playwright, newspaper columnist and poet, known for the novels Lament of Mohini, Maria's Room and Kipling's Daughter, the children's books, Devil's Garden: Tales Of Pappudom, The Magic Store of Nu-Cham-Vu, Pazhassi Raja: The Royal Rebel, and his collected plays, Five & Other Plays and Midnight Hotel & Other Plays,.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Haig</span> English novelist and journalist

Matt Haig is an English author and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction books for children and adults, often in the speculative fiction genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maggie O'Farrell</span> Irish-British novelist (born 1972)

Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Helen Edmundson is a British playwright, screenwriter and producer. She has won awards and critical acclaim both for her original writing and for her adaptations of various literary classics for the stage and screen.

Coram Boy is a play written by Helen Edmundson with music composed by Adrian Sutton, based on the 2000 children's novel of the same name by Jamila Gavin, an epic adventure that concerns the theme of child cruelty. The play is called a "play with music", rather than a musical.

Melly Still is a British stage director, designer and choreographer.

Jahnavi Barua is an Indian author from Assam. She is the author of 'Next Door', a critically acclaimed collection of short stories set in Assam with insurgency as the background. Barua lives in Bangalore, and obtained her MBBS at Gauhati Medical College but does not practice medicine. She studied creative writing in the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaya Madhavan</span> Indian illustrator and writer (born 1972)

Jaya Madhavan is an Indian author, poet, The New Indian Express columnist and comic creator. She is a winner of The Children's Book Trust All India Competition for Writers of Children's Books.

Annie Zaidi is an English-language writer from India. Her novel, Prelude To A Riot, won the Tata Literature Live! Awards for Book of the Year 2020. In 2019, she won The Nine Dots Prize for her work Bread, Cement, Cactus and in 2018 she won The Hindu Playwright Award for her play, Untitled-1. Her non-fiction debut, a collection of essays, Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales, was short-listed for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2010.

Manorama Jafa is an Indian author of more than 100 books for children, as well as feminist novels for adults, and academic research and writing on children's literature. She has served as Secretary General of the Association of Writers and Illustrators for Children and as the Secretary General of the Indian National Section of the International Board on Books for Young People. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014, and the Order of the Rising Sun in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neha Singh</span>

Neha Singh is an Indian theatre-maker, author and campaigner who encourages women to ignore harassment and reclaim the public space.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Jamila Gavin – Literature". British Council . Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  2. 1 2 "Jamila Gavin – Author" Archived 4 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine . Egmont UK Ltd. Retrieved 7 September 2013.
  3. "Shakespeare Schools Foundation Patrons". Shakespeare Schools Foundation. Shakespeare Schools Foundation. Archived from the original on 11 December 2017. Retrieved 12 July 2021.
  4. 1 2 "Alexander the Great: Man, Myth, or Monster?" Archived 11 March 2015 at the Wayback Machine (publisher display). Walker Books. Retrieved 7 September 2013.
    Walker describes the book as biography and history but says that it "will fascinate young readers of fact and fiction alike" and assigns the BIC Code "General fiction (Children's/YA)".
  5. "Word". Archived from the original on 6 May 2018. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  6. Cindy Jefferies
  7. [ permanent dead link ]
  8. "Author Jamila Gavin supports restoration of Minchinhampton Market House" Archived 6 March 2019 at the Wayback Machine . Rachel Clare. Stroud News & Journal. 18 November 2009. Retrieved 19 November 2009.
  9. "South Bank: 2003–2012" Archived 22 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine The History of the National Theatre. National Theatre. Retrieved 8 September 2013.
  10. "Olivier Winners 2006". Olivier Awards. Archived from the original on 29 October 2021. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  11. "Video". Archived from the original on 4 August 2020. Retrieved 7 April 2020.
  12. "Royal Society of Literature » Current RSL Fellows". rsliterature.org. Archived from the original on 6 February 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  13. "Seven Somerset locals receive King's Birthday Honours". Somerset County Gazette . 15 June 2024. Retrieved 15 June 2024.
  14. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 March 2017. Retrieved 8 March 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  15. "Scriptwriters Group – The Society of Authors". societyofauthors.org. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  16. "Finalists Announced for Prestigious NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature". The Neustadt Prize. 15 July 2014. Archived from the original on 2 April 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  17. 1 2 Jamila Gavin at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Retrieved 8 September 2013.