Biography
Youd, is an old Cheshire surname. Sam Youd was born in Huyton, Lancashire. He was educated at Peter Symonds' School in Winchester, Hampshire in 1932. Sam adopted the name Christopher Samuel Youd for his professional writings, leading to the widespread but mistaken belief that that was his birth name. Throughout his life he was known simply as Sam to his friends and acquaintances. He served in World War II in the Royal Corps of Signals from 1941 to 1946. A scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation made it possible for him to pursue a writing career, beginning with The Winter Swan (Dennis Dobson, 1949) under the name Christopher Youd. He wrote science fiction short stories as John Christopher from 1951 and his first book under that name was a science fiction novel, Year of the Comet, published by Michael Joseph in 1955. John Christopher's second novel, The Death of Grass (Michael Joseph, 1956) was Youd's first major success as a writer. It was published next year in the U.S. as No Blade of Grass (Simon & Schuster, 1957); an American magazine published Year of the Comet later that year and it was issued in 1959 as an Avon paperback entitled Planet in Peril. After Grass, Youd continued to use the John Christopher pseudonym for a majority of his writing and all of his science fiction (thereafter, many novels and few short stories). The Death of Grass has been reissued many times, most recently in the Penguin Modern Classics (2009).
In 1966 he started writing science fiction for adolescents. The Tripods trilogy (1967–68), The Lotus Caves (1969), The Guardians (1970), and the Sword of the Spirits trilogy (1971–72) were well received. He won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for The Guardians. (The award is conferred by The Guardian newspaper, coincidentally, and judged by a panel of children's writers.) In 1976 he won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, youth fiction category, for the same novel in German-language translation (Die Wächter).
Youd died in Bath, England, on 3 February 2012 of complications from bladder cancer.
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