Jane Gardam, a beloved children’s book author, passed away on Monday in Chipping Norton, England. She was 96 years old.
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Her son, Tom Gardam, confirmed to The New York Times, stating she died at a care facility.
A writer for more than 50 years, Gardam was known for her children’s books, including The Hollow Land, which earned her the 1983 Whitbread Children’s Book Award, as well as The Kit Stories, Through the Doll’s House Door, and Black Woolly Pony.
She was also known for her adult novels such as God on the Rocks, which was nominated for The Booker Prize Best Novel in 1978, The Queen of the Tambourine, which won the 1991 Whitbread Novel Award, and Last Friends, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize. She retired from writing in 2014.
A BBC survey voted her book Old Filth among the 100 greatest British novels in 2015.
She is survived by her three children, Tom, Catharine, and Tom. Her husband, David, whom she married in 1954, passed away in 2010.
Jane Gardam Once Revealed How Her Mother Encouraged Her to Read and Write
During a 2022 interview with The Paris Review, Jane Gardam opened up about when she first started to read and write.
“My mother was the one who read to me,” Jane recalled. “She read out loud very nicely, and I would look over her shoulder. I remember the moment when I suddenly realized, Ah, the marks represent sounds! This must be reading!”
She then said she went to school at five, and from then on, it seemed to her that the only “sensible thing” to do was to read and write things down.
“But my parents thought I was rather thick, because I couldn’t do maths,” the author pointed out. “I was so inhibited by my father. He was a mathematician and had thought I was going to be a genius at maths.”
She joked, “At the school where he was a housemaster, he’d go around saying to the boys, I’ve got a little girl of five at home and she can do quadratic equations, why can’t you? It was a lie. I still can’t, and I certainly couldn’t at five. They hated me, these boys.”