Career
McCaughrean is the youngest of three children. She studied teaching but found her true vocation in writing. She claims that what makes her love writing is the desire to escape from an unsatisfactory world. Her motto is: do not write about what you know, write about what you want to know.
Her work includes many retellings of classic stories for children: The Odyssey, El Cid, The Canterbury Tales, The Pilgrim's Progress, Moby Dick, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and Gilgamesh.
J. M. Barrie gave all rights to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1929, and in 2004, to coincide with Peter Pan's centenary, the hospital launched a competition to find the author of a sequel. McCaughrean won the competition, after submitting a synopsis and a sample chapter. Peter Pan in Scarlet was released internationally on 5 October 2006, and published in the UK by Oxford University Press and in the US by Simon & Schuster.
McCaughrean has written many other children's fiction books including The Kite Rider, The Stones Are Hatching, and Plundering Paradise. She has also written six historical novels for adults.
Read more about this topic: Geraldine McCaughrean
Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)