Aidan Chambers obituary

​Aidan Chambers 1934-2025

I first heard that Aidan Chambers had died from friends in the Flemish branch of IBBY and this reflects the high regard in which he was held internationally as both an author and an educator, winning the Hans Christian Andersen Author Award in 2002, only the second British writer (after Eleanor Farjeonin 1956) to win this. Aidan received the award at IBBY’s jubilee congress which took place in Basel. Quentin Blake won the illustrator award in the same year but was unable to attend so, as Chair of IBBY UK at the time, I was asked to receive it on his behalf. Prior to the award ceremony we met the Empress of Japan who was a guest at the congress and I remember Aidan chatting with her before we stepped out on the stage.

An early encounter with Aidan’s work was being advised by Sheila Ray to read The Reluctant Reader when I was training to be a librarian at Birmingham Polytechnic in the 1970s. I realised later that I’d engaged with another aspect of his work a bit earlier when, as a teenager, I read some of the books that he edited for the Macmillan Topliners series. Sam & Me by Joan Tate stands out in my memory and Farrukh Dhondy’sfirst collection of stories East End at Your Feet was a later addition.

Aidan was a great advocate for the translation of children’s literature. Turton & Chambers (1989-1996), the company he co-founded focused on translations and published books that originated in French, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch. Aidan was also involved in a project which involved exchange between Dutch & Flemish and British authors, which included a memorable conference at Roehampton University. One of the Flemish authors involved, BartMoeyaert, saw Aidan as a mentor and influence and IBBY UK reunited them in a discussion at the IBBY congress in London in 2012.

Aidan edited a number of short story collections and wrote two novels for children – Seal Secret and The Present Takers. However, he was particularly admired as a writer of YA fiction, or as he termed it, youth fiction. He expounded his ideas about this in his last book The Age Between: PersonalReflections on Youth Fiction, published by Fincham Press at the University of Roehampton in 2020. Here he wrote in detail about his six novels which he thought of as the Dance Sequence: Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, Now I Know, The Toll Bridge, Postcards from No Man’s Land (for which he won the Carnegie Medal 1999) and This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, summing up that his intention was ‘not merely to produce one book after another, but to create a body of work, each book of which belongs in one way and another to all the others.’

The Hans Christian Andersen Medal is given for a body of work and a wider contribution to children’s literature is frequently taken into account and Aidan Chambers has been hugely influential, in particular his essential guides The Reading Environment: How Adults Help Children Enjoy Books and Tell Me (Children, Reading and Talk). The latter includes an enabling framework for talking about books that has helped teachers enormously. I observed the way that this was consistently integrated within the imaginative and thorough teaching sequences written by the advisory teacher team at CLPE (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education), of which Aidan was a patron, throughout the years I worked with them.

These two books are among the publications of the Thimble Press which also included seminal works by Margaret Meek and Peter Hollindale and the highly regarded journal about children’s literature Signal. The Thimble Press and its associated activities such as the Signal Poetry Award were collaborations between Aidan and his wife Nancy and their significant partnership was recognised when they jointly won the Eleanor Farjeon Award in 1982.

Aidan Chambers’ ideas and writing have had a wide influence and will continue to do so. I have one more thing to thank him. I had resisted keeping a reading diary because I thought that it would mean writing a comment about every book I listed. At one of the talks Aidan gave at CLPE he told his audience that in his own reading diary all he records is the date he finishes a book, the author and the title. I felt that I’d been given ‘permission’ to do the same by a writer and thinker I respected and I now have a reading diary listing every book I’ve read (with the occasional comment!) going back many years. Thank you, Aidan Chambers, for the pathways to reading and writing you have demonstrated to librarians and teachers and the enjoyment and understanding that children and young people have gained through these.

Ann Lazim