Leon Garfield

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Leon Garfield was born on July 14, 1921, in Brighton, England. After attending grammar school in Brighton, he briefly studied art and then served for five years in the Army Medical Corps. He worked for twenty years in a London hospital as a biochemical technician while establishing himself as a writer. He lives in London.

Garfield taught himself to write fiction by imitating authors such as Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Although usually categorized as a writer for juveniles, he prefers to call his books "family novels," accessible to the intelligent twelve-yearold and still enjoyable for the adult.

After writing various stories aimed at the adult reader, Garfield achieved his first real success with Jack Holborn, originally submitted as an adult novel but published in shortened form as a juvenile book. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae, Garfield's novel is likewise set in the eighteenth century. Garfield found he had an affinity for this historical period. He has subsequently published dozens of novels, mostly adventure tales for young adults and usually set in London or southern England during the eighteenth century. He has also published short stories, a play, a nonfiction book about eighteenth-century England, and several retellings of classic tales and myths. Garfield also completed The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens's unfinished novel, successfully matching the Victorian writer's style and spirit.

Garfield's books have received several awards, including the prestigious Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association for The God Beneath the Sea, a retelling of Greek myths on which he collaborated with Edward Blishen. Three of his books have been runnersup for the Carnegie Medal: Smith, Black Jack, and The Drummer Boy.

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