(person) by junkpile Thu Sep 28 2000 at 17:05:10

Susan Cooper was born on May 23, 1935, in England. Says she discovered she was a writer when she was about eight. She attended Oxford University, and was the first woman ever to edit the university magazine, Cherwell. After graduating, she becamse a reporter for The Sunday Times. Her first boss was Ian Fleming, and she says he smoked too much and scared her, but was a "poppet ").

Her first books were born during this period, written after work and on weekends. In response to a publishing house competition for a children's adventure story, she wrote her first kids' book, Over Sea, Under Stone.

At age 27 she left England to marry an American widower with three teenage children. She had two children of her own, giving birth two months after her stepdaughter, who had to teach Susan how to change a diaper.

She has worked with actors Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy on several projects, co-writing plays and screenplays. After Jessica Tandy died, Susan married Hume.

She is not the same thing as Susan Rogers Cooper or Susan Fenimore Cooper. She is frequently the same as Susan L. Cooper and Susan Lewis Cooper.

She collects seeds wherever she goes. Once she had a pet squirrel named Sleepy.


Quotes:

"Ideas are mysteriously born in the unconscious mind: that shadowy place in which - though we don't know it - we store echoes of everything we have ever seen or heard or done, every person we've met, every story we've read. In there, all these old scraps are melted together, as if in a furnace, and once in a while, if you're lucky, they fuse into something bright and astonishing."

"The books aren't written for children, or for anyone in particular; they simply appear and grow, out of the great jumble of English and Celtic myth and legend that my subconscious has acquired over the years. In spite of all the hard work involved, it always seems to me rather like the way a splendid crop of mushrooms can spring up overnight in an empty pasture: a wonderful magic for which one is grateful without quite understanding how, or from where, it came."

"I don't know what kind of person I have become, but I can tell you how I got there."


Books:

Behind the Golden Curtain

The Boggart

The Boggart and the Monster

The Dark Is Rising

Dawn of Fear

Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

Foxfire (play, co-authored with Hume Cronyn)

Greenwitch

The Grey King (1976 Newbery Award)

King of Shadows

Mandrake

Matthew's Dragon

Over Sea, Under Stone

Portrait of An Author: J.B. Priestley

Seaward

The Silver Cow

Silver On the Tree

thanks to:
http://missy.shef.ac.uk/~emp94ms/welcome.html
http://www.edupaperback.org/authorbios/coopersu.html
www.amazon.com

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