Here are some facts about Susan Cooper.
- Susan Cooper was born on 23 May 1935 in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England.
- Her most famous for her The Dark is Rising book series.
- Susan Cooper’s mother was a teacher, her father worked in the Natural History Museum, then went to fight in World War 1. After the war he worked on the Great Western Railway.
- Susan Cooper went to Oxford University and studied English.
- After finishing university, she worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times. One of her bosses was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.
- Her first published novel was a science fiction book called Mandrake. It was published in 1964.
- In 1963, Susan Cooper moved to the United States, marrying Nicholas J. Grant, a professor.
- in the US, she became a full-time author, and worked on The Dark is Rising.
- In 1970, she published Dawn of Fear, a book about her experiences in World War 2.
- Her first marriage cam to an end in 1983, and she married her second husband, Hume Cronyn (and actor and author) in 1996.
- In 2002 she was presented with the Hans Christian Anderson for her contributions as a children’s author.
- In total, including children’s picture books, she has written more than 20 books. she has also written a Broadway play and several screenplays.
- World War 2 took place when she was a child and she remembers spending nights in her family’s air-raid shelter as German bombers flew overhead.
- She was an avid reader as a child, enjoying everything from fairy stories to the works of Charles Dickens.
- The famous authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were both teaching at Oxford when Susan Cooper was a student there. She remembers Tolkien shouting the opening lines of Beowulf during a lecture on Anglo-Saxon literature.
