SPECIAL FEATURE: a tribute to Aidan Chambers, 1934 - 2025

 

"A quiet trailblazer, always innovative with structure, bold and provocative ..."

Aidan Chambers is known and widely respected for his ground-breaking youth fiction and also as an educationalist with a special interest in how children/teenagers and books interact. With his wife Nancy he founded Signal, a review of children's literature, for which they were jointly given the Eleanor Farjeon Award, and from 2003-2006 he was President of the School Library Association. He has an international reputation and was a winner of the Hans Andersen Award, the Carnegie Medal and the Michael Prinz Award - the two latter for Postcards from No Man's Land. Aidan died on May 11th.

Celia Rees and Linda Newbery on how influential and inspiring a writer he was and how important to their own writing.

Linda: I wish I'd been able to read Aidan Chambers as a teenager, which certainly isn't to say that I haven't loved his books as an adult - they're enduring favourites. But had I read them when younger, I'd have been enlightened and reassured, discovering myself in his characters and situations. He was a quiet trailblazer, always innovative with structure, bold and provocative for those readers who found and engaged with his work, while never a publicity-seeker. Dance on my Grave was one of the first teenage novels about homosexuality, without ever trumpeting itself as such; Postcards from No Man's Land included the now very topical subject of assisted dying. Neither, though, could be described as 'issues' fiction; he would rightly have resisted such categorisation.

In spite of winning the Carnegie Medal for Postcards from No Man's Land, he was better known and appreciated in other European countries than in the UK. In the days when I was frequently in secondary schools, I regularly recommended his books, disappointed that so few teenagers knew of them - though there'd often be a teacher or librarian nodding in agreement. It was notable that reports of his death last week appeared more quickly in the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy than they did here. While never really on the festivals or author tour circuits, Aidan travelled widely to speak at conferences, where he was admired as much for his writing about children and reading as for his ground-breaking fiction. In recent years he'd given up being traditionally published, but still wrote prolifically - how could he not? - producing privately-printed fiction and memoir which he sent out to friends and acquaintances. I was honoured to be one of those, and my collection of these books has pride of place on my shelves. 

In The Age Between, he writes that youth fictions (his preferred term) "too often concentrate only on emotionally and physically sensational episodes, and neglect those other key aspects of youthhood which interest me the most and interests many youths: the cognitive, linguistic, and intellectual, the rich experience of fecund language and complex thought and spiritual awakening that are an important - I'd say vital - part of youthhood." These qualities are found in abundance in all his novels, never more so than in the one that remains my favourite, The Toll Bridge - cleverly structured, engrossing us in the lives of three characters, Jan, Tess and Adam (none of these their real names) linked by a physical and symbolic bridge and by the idea of Janus, who looks both forward and back. Brilliant, powerful, inevitably a bit dated but as fresh and vital as when I first read it in 1992, it gives the exhilarating sense of engaging with a mind that's constantly alert and agile, searching for meaning and identity. 

Aidan Chambers set the bar very high, showing just how complex and satisfying youth fiction can be. He's inspired and influenced many a writer, including both Celia and myself. The book of mine that probably owes the most to him is The Shell House - which I dedicated to him rather cryptically. ('The other AC' is because one of the novel's characters also had those initials.)

Celia: Periodically, I read in the review columns of newspapers, the pages of The Bookseller, or on a blog post, or I hear on a podcast, bookcast or a book programme that ‘there were no YA novels before ---'. You can fill in the date. I allow myself a wry smile and forgive the ignorance because I know that is not true. For me, the 1980s were the golden age of what we now know as YA Literature. The writers who were writing then were pioneering a genre that could, indeed, be counted as Literature with a capital L. They were writing novels with the all the rich complexity of adult fiction, on serious, provocative subjects, but they were writing for teenagers (which is was the term we used back then). Publishers had dedicated lists for Teen Fiction, separate from their Children’s Fiction. I know because I was teaching English in a comprehensive school and I was was always on the lookout for fiction that would challenge and stretch my students but would rivet them to a story that was not for children, not for adults, but for and about them. This is difficult, skilled writing, driven by a passion to deliver the very best to that most deserving but ill served group of readers - teenagers.

Aidan Chambers was one of a group of writers which included Alan Garner, Joan Lingard and American writers S.E. Hinton, Robert Cormier and Lois Duncan. Their writing was brave, innovative and powerful. It stood up to literary analysis and study but remained consistently engaging. Their fiction could involve serious issues: rape, homosexuality, violence and abuse but ‘issues’ were never central, they were part of the story, because the story mirrored real life.

I was a huge admirer of this cohort of writers. They directly inspired me to become a writer. I wanted to write the kind of books that they were writing. So that’s what I did. Many years after I began writing, I had the pleasure of meeting Aidan at a School Library Association Conference and was able to tell him what an inspiration he'd been to me and how much of a debt I owed to him. 

 

Aidan Chambers was also known for his deep knowledge, criticism and his commentary on the state of children's literature. He and his wife, Nancy Chambers, were passionate about reading and the need for books that would enable young readers to become sophisticated readers of adult fiction. This is one of the reasons that he was so highly regarded abroad. It was also why I was such an admirer. One of my favourite books of his is Postcards From No Man’s Land. In this book he not only tackles serious and difficult issues, sexual ambiguity and identity, assisted dying, but plays with narrative structure and form in ways that are as edgy as the subject matter. In my own novel, The Wish House, I took courage from him to challenge what is possible, or even acceptable in YA literature. It was a risk. The Wish House was admired by some, hated by others. It was a risk Aidan Chambers knew well.

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Celia and Linda both acknowledge their debt to Aidan Chambers - in particular for Celia's The Wish House and Linda's The Shell House.

Celia Rees's Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook  (Miss Graham's War in paperback) is published by Harper Collins.

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.