Alan Garner has become, through a relatively modest output, one of the most important writers for children since 1960. His work is carefully crafted, economic, and precise. His early works-- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley (1960), The...

When Alan Garner was a child, he almost died three times. A very sickly boy, he suffered variously from spinal and cerebral meningitis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and diphtheria, at times so ill that he could neither speak nor move. It was on these occasions...

In 1968 Alan Garner, defending his focus on the adolescent audience, asserted in "A Bit More Practice" that "This group of people is the most important of all, and selfishly, it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement."...

Byline: Jaya Narain GIVEN the earning power of their millionaire boyfriends it's safe to saythat what a Wag wants, a Wag usually gets. Until now. One man, renowned children's author Alan Garner, has seen enough of the'Footballers' Wives' culture that...

Garner, A.P.W.U. take city hoops title By GUY B. STULLER of the Journal Sentinel staff Tuesday, March 27, 2001 A lot of good basketball players were competing in the Municipal League championship game Monday night at Custer high school. ...

[Alan Garner's] books, though few, have had an extraordinarily powerful impact; they have been felt and not forgotten. (p. 108) Because Garner's four novels came out at intervals of two and three years, they show their differences—and the author's development—more clearly than do the works of more prolific writers. Alan Garner has never stood still. His stories have become less complicated but more complex, less crowded but more intricately ramified. Action has become less...

Something has happened to Alan Garner. He is never a predictable writer, and one can never be sure just what he will produce next. But one thing has so far been common to all his work: It has been emotionally overcharged. (With the exception, I hasten to say, of his nativity play, Holly from the Bongs, all too little known, and a gem.) To put it in crude critical shorthand, Garner's work has so far lacked balance. One always felt the tremble of incipient hysteria: all those dark elemental forces abou...

Alan Garner's writing is marked by hard thinking and hard, fierce imagining. These have been brought to bear upon a distinctive choice of subject: the meeting-plane of two contiguous worlds. One is the world that most of us agree to describe, however inadequately, as ordinary, everyday, or by some such term. The other is the world of folklore and myth, dream and nightmare and vision. The wall between these two worlds is tough, but of less than tissue-paper thinness. Where the thinness can be worn int...