Michelle Magorian

Michelle Magorian is an English author and actress best known for historical novels for children and young adults. Born in Portsmouth in 1947, she trained at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and at Marcel Marceau’s International School of Mime in Paris before working professionally in theatre. Her first novel, Goodnight Mister Tom, follows the neglected young evacuee William Beech, who is sent from London to live with the reclusive Tom Oakley at the outbreak of the Second World War. The novel won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and an International Reading Association Award and was later adapted for television, the stage and musical theatre.

Magorian has returned repeatedly to wartime and post-war Britain, exploring how children and families adjusted to evacuation, separation, rationing and social change. Back Home concerns a girl returning to England after spending five years in the United States, while A Little Love Song follows two sisters living in an English seaside town during the war. Cuckoo in the Nest and A Spoonful of Jam evoke the austerity and theatrical world of the late 1940s, and Just Henry, which won the 2008 Costa Children’s Book Award, combines a family mystery with the culture of post-war cinema. Across her books, Magorian uses carefully researched everyday detail, sympathetic characters and strong emotional narratives to show how the consequences of war continued long after the fighting ended.