Susan Cooper - Biography

Biography

Born in 1935 in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, Susan Cooper lived in Buckinghamshire, just northwest of London, until she was 21, when her parents moved to her grandmother's village of Aberdovey, Wales. She attended Slough High School and then earned a degree in English from the University of Oxford.

After University graduation, she worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times of London under Ian Fleming, and wrote in her spare time. During that period she began work on the Dark Is Rising series and finished her debut novel, the science fiction Mandrake, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1964.

Cooper emigrated to the United States in 1963 to marry Nicholas J. Grant, Professor of Metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then became a full-time writer, focusing on the Dark Is Rising series and on Dawn of Fear (1970), a novel based on her childhood wartime experiences. Eventually she would write fiction for both children and adults, a series of picture books, film screenplays, and works for the stage.

In July 1996, she married Canadian-American actor and her sometime co-author Hume Cronyn, the widower of Jessica Tandy. (Cronyn and Tandy had starred in the 1982 Broadway production of Foxfire, written by Cooper and Cronyn.) Cooper and Cronyn were married until his death in June 2003.

Hollywood adapted The Dark is Rising 1973 novel as a film in 2007, titled The Seeker. It disappointed Cooper; she requested that some changes be restored back to the original narrative, to no avail.

Cooper is on the Board of the National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance (NCBLA), a U.S. nonprofit organization that advocates for literacy, literature, and libraries.

She currently lives in Marshfield, Massachusetts.