Well known largely for her award-winning fantasy series "The Dark is Rising," Susan Mary Cooper has enjoyed great critical success in a variety of genres--newspaper articles, essays, biography, science fiction, drama, screenplays, and children's fiction. Cooper's novels and picture books for young readers are mostly fantasies that draw on British and Celtic myths and legends--exploring the struggle between good and evil, the "Light" and the "Dark," tradition and technology. Her work has elicited much critical discussion and has won virtually every major British and American award for children's writing.

Cooper was born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England, on 23 May 1935 to John Richard Cooper and Ethel May Field. Her father had worked in the reading room of the natural history museum until going off to fight in World War I, from which he returned with a wounded leg. He then pursued a career in the offices of the Great Western...