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Malcolm Saville Author

Malcolm Saville (1901-1982) was a prolific English children’s writer who wrote his books while working in the publicity departments of London publishers. The progressive children’s author Geoffrey Trease observed that Saville was an author with ‘an intense feeling’ for the English countryside and that this novel contains the ‘essential’ Saville, whose reputation is rooted in the many series of adventure books that he wrote between the years 1943 and 1978 and is most associated with his ‘Lone Pine’ series of novels. Many of Saville’s books were dramatised for the BBC’s Children’s Hour, and he apparently received 3,000 letters a week from young readers. We are told that Saville, a good publicist, answered all his fan mail personally (quite a feat if true) and he certainly sent out regular newsletters to his fans. Hazel Sheeky Bird is a Research Associate at the University of Newcastle in the UK. Her research interests in children's literature range from 1890 into the mid-20th century, including what has come to be known as camping and tramping fiction. She uses a wide range of literary and historical sources on access to and use of the countryside, social mobility and class relations, the politics of leisure, culture and sailing, mapping, geographical exploration, national identity and Englishness.