September 13 is "Roald Dahl Day", celebrated every year on what would have been the author's birthday. This year also marks 50 years since Dahl's classic tale James and the Giant Peach
was first published. Your child can celebrate by sending a Peach-gram to a friend! |
| illustration by Jed Alexander |
From THE GUARDIAN:
According to his biographer Donald Sturrock, in Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl
(2010), Dahl was "a conundrum". Certainly, by any standards, he led a strange and complex life. Born to Norwegian parents, brought up in Wales and in England, he crashed in a plane in the desert in the second world war, and then became a spy in America, befriending the great and the good, before eventually settling back down in England, where he overcame three great tragedies: an accident that caused his baby son, Theo, brain damage, in 1960; the death of his daughter, Olivia, aged only seven, in 1962; and his wife's stroke in 1965. (A fourth tragedy occurred in 1990 when his stepdaughter, Lorina, died of a brain tumour.)Dahl's daily retreat from the world was his famous writing hut. "I go down to my little hut, where it's tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again," he said. In the hut, snuggled up in a sleeping bag, with his famous green baize writing board across his armchair, his lined yellow legal pads and his Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, he wrote, pausing only for lunch, The World at One, and then dinner, drinks and a game of snooker.
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| Dahl's writing hut, "The Gipsy House", Buckinghamshire, England. Photo: Eamonn McCabe |
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| The interior has been left unchanged, since Dahl's death from Leukemia in 1990. Photo: Eamonn McCabe |