Alan Garner was born on 17 October 1934. He comes from a family of craftsmen who have lived for generations near Alderley Edge in Cheshire, England, a place featured in many of his books. Garner's childhood was not easy. He suffered from several debilitating illnesses and proved clumsy in pursuing the craftsmanship traditional in his family. He was successful at school, except for the ridicule that his dialect attracted. In short, information about Garner's early years indicates a person of contrasts: weak health contrasted with ability in athletics; encouragement from teachers contrasted with their abuse of his speech; attachment to a place contrasted with his removal from this place through education.
Garner went to Manchester Grammar School and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read classics. At age twenty-one he read William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) and resolved to become a writer. Leaving Oxford before taking his degree, Garner returned to Cheshire, to a medieval timber-framed house situated about eight miles from Alderley. On 4 September 1956 he began writing what would become his first work of fiction, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley. Since then his life as a writer has been a struggle to return emotionally and spiritually to the place of his childhood.
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