He attended a local village school, where he found that, despite being praised for his intelligence, he was punished for speaking in his native Cheshire dialect for instance, when he was six his primary school teacher washed his mouth out with soapy water. Garner faced several life-threatening childhood illnesses, which left him bed ridden for much of the time. The story of the king and the wizard living under the hill played an important part in his life, becoming, he explained, "deeply embedded in my psyche" and heavily influencing his later novels. Garner later remarked that as a result, he was "aware of magic" as a child, and he and his friends often played there. Instead, he taught his grandson the folk tales he knew about The Edge. Garner's grandfather, Joseph Garner, "could read, but didn't and so was virtually unlettered". Robert Garner and his other relatives had all been craftsmen, and, according to Garner, each successive generation had tried to "improve on, or do something different from, the previous generation". In the mid-nineteenth century Alan's great-great-grandfather Robert had carved the face of a bearded wizard onto the face of a cliff next to a well, known locally at that time as the Wizard's Well. Garner has stated that his family had passed on "a genuine oral tradition" involving folk tales about The Edge, which included a description of a king and his army of knights who slept under it, guarded by a wizard. His "rural working-class family", had been connected to Alderley Edge since at least the sixteenth century and could be traced back to the death of William Garner in 1592. He was raised in nearby Alderley Edge, a well-to-do village that had effectively become a suburb of Manchester. Garner was born in the front room of his grandmother's house in Congleton, Cheshire, on 17 October 1934. But what did I know that I could write about? I knew the land." My ability was in language and languages. "I had to get aback, by using skills that had been denied to my ancestors but I had nothing that they would have called worthwhile. In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work.
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He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He wrote several fantasy novels, including Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973). Garner wrote a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), and a third book, Boneland (2012). A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then briefly at Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern Period (circa 1590) building known as Toad Hall. Much of his work is rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.īorn in Congleton, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as "The Edge", where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region.
Alan Garner OBE FRSL (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales.
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