Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper, one of today's most distinguished children's book writers, won a Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor for books in her fantasy sequence, The Dark is Rising. The first in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, is perhaps more readily identified as a family adventure story, but it is much more than that. In Over Sea, Under Stone we have the first insights into the battle between the Dark and the Light and the introduction to the Arthurian and Celtic myths and legends which permeate the whole of the sequence. After completing Over Sea, Under Stone the listener has experienced only a taster of what is to come in the remaining stories. The Dark Is Rising series is a triumph. The series of books is moulded by Susan Cooper's own background and each book effectively weaves a path between the stuff of myth and legend and the lives of everyday people - people like us. One of the books in the series, The Grey King, won the Newbery Medal and The Dark Is Rising was a Newbery Honor book. 

Susan lives in a house on an island in a salt marsh in Massachusetts, where she is close to her children and grandchildren in the town next door.  Visit her online at www.thelostland.com.