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 | Meljean Brook, Alyssa Day, Marjorie M. Liu, Maggie Shayne |
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Robin McKinley Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown and a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword. Her latest novel, Dragonhaven, is currently available from Putnam Young Readers. Robin McKinley lives...in southern England with three whippets (Rowan, Holly, and Hazel), over five hundred rose bushes, a cream-coloured 1965 MGB convertible, and her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson. "I grew up a military brat and an only child, and decided very early on that books were much more reliable friends than people. Over time I altered my views about people (which is to say I learnt to write letters) but I was into my thirties before it occurred to me not to keep moving on every year or two. I had settled down in a coastal village in Maine for life, as I thought, when Peter happened. One of us had to move, and it was obviously going to be me (I said): I was the one with all the practise. "Living in permanent exile is a whole new experience. England is home now in a way nowhere in the States has ever been; I've lived in this house, which has seen three generations of Peter's family so far and is watching the fourth grow up, longer than I've lived anywhere. That doesn't make me English. But I'm not American any more either. I'm something else. "It's interesting, being something else. It also, perhaps, gives me a useful extra excuse for my constitutional waywardness. "When Peter and I aren't writing (we write on either side of the same wall, so we can shout through the door at each other) we're gardening—we have a big, crowded, old-fashioned English country garden—walking dogs, cooking, reading. I also run most mornings, early, before I go to my desk; it's my best plotting time, except when I'm busy being ravished by the beauty of the sunrise or sinking to my ankles in Hampshire mud. "The changeover from years beginning '19' to years beginning '20' seems to have reminded me that life is short and I'd better be getting on with it. I've begun studying core shamanism, I'm learning English change ringing, and, as I write this, have just started fencing lessons. Fortunately the fencing seems to use an entirely different set of muscles than bell-ringing. My bell-ringing teacher keeps telling me to let the bell do the work, but I keep forgetting. At least fencing is supposed to make you sweat." —Robin McKinley |
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