Life and Career
Born in Mursley, north Buckinghamshire, Crossley-Holland grew up in Whiteleaf, a small village in the Chilterns. He attended Bryanston School in Dorset, followed by St Edmund Hall at Oxford University, where after failing his first exams he discovered a passion for Anglo-Saxon literature. After graduating he became the Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds and, from 1972 to 1977, he lectured in Anglo-Saxon for the Tufts University London program. He also taught in the midwestern United States as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at St. Olaf College, as well as Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of St. Thomas.
His writing career began when he began working as a poetry, fiction and children’s book editor for Macmillan Publishers. He later become editorial director at Victor Gollancz, Ltd.. He is known for poetry, novels, story collections, and translations, including three editions of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf (1968, 1973, 1999). Some of his books, including the Arthur trilogy, reinterpret medieval legends. He also writes definitive collections of Norse myths (The Penguin Book of Norse Myths) and British and Irish folk tales (The Magic Lands: Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland). Bracelet of Bones, the first of his Viking sagas, was published in 2011, as was The Mountains of Norfolk: New and Selected Poems. He has edited and translated the riddles included in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book.
Crossley-Holland has also written the libretti for two operas by Nicola LeFanu, The Green Children (1966) and The Wildman (1976), and for a chamber opera about Nelson, Haydn and Emma Hamilton. He has collaborated several times with composers Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias and he has written a stage play, The Wuffings (1999).
Crossley-Holland now lives on the North Norfolk coast, where he spent some of his childhood.
His autobiography, The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood, was published in 2009.
In 2012 he took up the honorary post of President of the School Library Association.
Read more about this topic: Kevin Crossley-Holland
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