One of the defining authors of Children’s Literature has died. Dick King-Smith was one of the authors that is, for me, indelibly linked with a very English style. Simple. Deceptively simple. He wrote stories that everyone thought they could write. But they couldn’t. Nowhere near. I remember trying to pastiche the style – choosing a farmyard animal and giving it a funny personality. Didn’t work. Nowhere near.
So thank you Dick King-Smith for being one of the spurs that made me love books so much. Thank you for giving me the habit of staring at pigs and trying to figure out if they were staring back. Thank you for making me find out just exactly what a Saddleback and a Gloucester Old Spot were.
Thank you for being such a damn good writer.
The Guardian has an obituary here and the Telegraph has one here
Daisy May Johnson 