Remembering MARY HOOPER, 1945 - 2026, a tribute by Celia Rees and Jean Ure

 

Celia: Here at Writers Review we were deeply saddened to hear of the death of our good friend, Mary Hooper. Mary’s death on 24th May this year was a shock to us all. She was not just a literary colleague but a friend, always there to celebrate, when celebrations were in order and commiserate when they were not. I had known her for over thirty years. She was an early member of the Scattered Authors’ Society, which is where I first met her. She was a regular participant in SAS get togethers and lunches in London with fellow authors Linda Newbery, Adèle Geras, Jean Ure, Anne Cassidy and Sally Prue. Mary was always excellent company and only ceased attending after her diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease made travel difficult for her.

She and I both wrote historical fiction for Bloomsbury Children’s Books and were often paired together for events. Mary was very good company, ebulliently funny and always very supportive, on the platform and off it. We did some memorable events together all over the country. Mary was just the same, large audience or small, her warm, engaging personality came over, as did her knowledge of her subject, which was second to none.

Fallen Grace, nominated for the Carnegie Medal

She was a prolific writer, with over a hundred titles for children and young adults. Her main focus was writing for teenage girls. That focus continued when she moved, extremely successfully, into historical fiction and this is what I know her for best. She won multiple awards and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Her research was always meticulous but her real talent was to make her characters come alive on the page. She was fascinated by women’s past lives and her range was wide, from the 17th Century to the First World War. Her most acclaimed novel and one of our personal favourites, Newes From The Dead, was based on an obscure historical footnote, the true story of Anne Green, a woman who was hanged at Oxford Assizes and who came back from the dead on an Oxford University dissecting table. Mary took this snippet of historical fact and spun it into an extraordinary story of survival and resilience.

Newes from the Dead, based on a historical incident

Although she set her historical fiction in different periods, all her novels are in different ways celebrations of the lives of ordinary girls and women, the people that history too often ignores and forgets. Whether they are servant girls or shopkeepers, Mary made sure that the lives of her heroines were discovered. I know as a fellow writer of historical fiction how much work and research uncovering those lives takes and how much deep understanding and empathy it takes to make these girls and women live for modern young readers. The world of children’s and young adult fiction is the poorer for her passing. She will be mourned and missed by her fellow writers and I have lost an old and valued friend.

Jean: Mary was one of my oldest writing chums – oldest, that is, in the sense that we went back a long way, sharing moments of triumph and moments of authorial outrage (mostly to do with editorial and/or publishing iniquities). I look back fondly to all those happy, gossipy lunches we had with old friends such as Adele Geras, Celia Rees, Linda Newbery and Anne Cassidy, all of us happily moaning about said iniquities.

Mary was very down to earth – even, occasionally, dismissive when it came to her own writing. “Oh,” she once airily said, when I was complaining that I didn’t know how to wind up one of my books, “I just pile all my characters into a boat and have it capsize, or kill them off in a cash crash.”

In fact she used to do a lot of research for the historical novels, such as Newes from the Dead, having belatedly taken a history degree to make up for having, as she said, spent her schooldays giggling and talking “far too much” to concentrate on learning anything.

She was a lively and amusing correspondent – I could always rely on her to lighten the mood and give me something to laugh about.

She is a sad loss and I shall miss her terribly.

Poppy, winner of the Young Quills Historical Association Award

See also Mary's Guardian obituary by her daughter Rowan.

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.