Writing
Westall was inspired to become a writer by telling his son Christopher stories about his experiences during World War II. His first book, The Machine Gunners, published by Macmillan in 1975, told a WWII story about English children who find "a crashed German bomber in the woods complete with machine gun". It was adapted as a BBC television serial in 1983.
Machine Gunners was set in Garmouth, a fictionalised Tynemouth, where he returned in other novels including The Watch House (1977) and Fathom Five (1979), which continues the Machine Gunners story.
Christopher Westall was killed in a motorbike accident at the age of 18 in 1978 and became the inspiration for The Devil on the Road (1978), commended for the Carnegie Medal, and for a short story in The Haunting of Chas McGill (1983).
Westall won a second Carnegie Medal for The Scarecrows (Chatto & Windus, 1981). No one has won three, yet he was not a full-time writer. He retired from teaching only in 1985, and tried dealing antiques before focusing exclusively on his writing. For Blitzcat (Bodley Head, 1989) he won the annual Smarties Prize in category 9–11 years. In 1994 the American Library Association named it one of the hundred Best Books for Young Adults of the Last 25 years. He finally won the once-in-a-lifetime Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for The Kingdom by the Sea (Methuen, 1990). Both that work and Gulf (1992) were highly commended runners up for the Carnegie Medal. The latter is a story about the home front during the Persian Gulf War.
From 1988 until his death Westall attended a writers circle in Lymm where he enjoyed assisting and mentoring new writers. One of the writing titles that was set by one of the students, Jonathan Welford, this was 'Nightmare', this was to be his last book titled The Night Mare, published after his death.
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