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The Guardian

Aidan Chambers obituary

Aidan Chambers, who has died aged 90, became a writer because he could find no suitable fiction for his students to enjoy. The teenaged pupils at the co-ed secondary modern where he taught in the mid-1960s specified their requirements in terms of length (short) and subject matter (not fantasy, not history). They wanted to see their lives reflected on the page. Chambers's first two novels, Cycle Smash (1967) and Marle (1968), were the result, written alongside a clutch of plays for performance in schools. In writing them, Chambers identified an audience and a voice his readers would respond to, and he became a pioneer of young adult fiction. His reputation rests on six 'youth novels' (Chambers's preferred term), which he referred to as the 'Dance' sequence – 'a dance of stories and of characters, a dance of incidents and ideas and experience … a dance of words, of language'. Beginning with Breaktime (1978), these differed from his earlier work in that they were not written with reluctant teen readers in mind. By then several years out of the classroom, and having lost touch with young teens, Chambers had evolved a mantra: 'Do not write for anyone, any particular readership, but focus on the text itself – on making the book, and allowing it to become what it wants to be.' The novels grappled with essential adolescent obsessions such as love, sexuality, identity and mortality. They also embraced Chambers's preference for short chapters and a filmic narrative, which meant that some scenes resembled a play script. Unsurprisingly, most of the books have been adapted successfully for the stage, and Chambers was pleased with François Ozon's interpretation of Dance on My Grave (1982) as the film Summer of 85 (2020). Readers passionately engaged with the characters, and academics pored over the technique. Born in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, Aidan was the only child of George Chambers, a funeral director, and Margaret (nee Hancock). He grew up in a house with few books, and learned to read fluently only at the age of nine. Even then, his preference was for films. At 13, the family having moved to Darlington, he was enrolled at Queen Elizabeth I grammar school. He credited Jim Osborn, the school's head of English, with changing his life. Osborn nurtured and broadened Chambers's experience of theatre to include acting and public speaking. He encouraged his student to read widely and build a personal library. Most significantly, perhaps, he informed Chambers that he would become a teacher himself. Teacher training followed national service with the Royal Navy, and in 1957, Chambers was appointed to Westcliff high school for boys, a grammar school in Southend-on-Sea, where he taught English and drama. Encouraged in the Christian faith through a teaching colleague, he was confirmed as a Christian and became a monk in a revolutionary new monastery in Stroud, Gloucestershire, with an emphasis on practical service to the community. He then took on another teaching post, and it was during his seven years at Archway secondary modern in Stroud that he wrote his first books. His faith foundered as his commitment to writing soared, and he resigned in 1968. Shortly afterwards, he met Nancy Lockwood, a magazine editor, who had relocated from the US, and they married later that year. They immediately sparked up a conversation about books, reading and living, that sustained them throughout their long, rewarding marriage. Together they established Thimble Press, which, between 1969 and 2003, produced 100 issues of the children's literature journal Signal, as well as other critical publications in the field. Chambers established Topliners, a landmark fiction series, for Macmillan Education, unusually for the time published straight into paperback, and providing accessible, engaging stories for teenage readers, of the kind Chambers had written himself. He became sought after as a reviewer in print and on television and radio, and a speaker at conferences attended by librarians and teachers. He tutored at tertiary level, and was an influential visiting lecturer at Westminster College, Oxford, at that time a teacher training institute. His handbooks, essays and talks formed a second major strand to his literary output. Reading was at the heart of his life's work. 'In our culture,' he wrote in The Age Between: Personal Reflections on Youth Fiction (2020), 'language is shaped as much by what is written as by what is said. When you write, and therefore also when you read, you can think in a different way than when you talk. Writing and reading are also forms of communication that transcend time and distance.' He did not regard reading as merely a pastime; what compelled him was an active engagement on the reader's part, a process of 'talking themselves into being', guided and assisted by the writer. Influenced by writers and theorists such as Barthes, Flaubert and Sartre, he saw the reader/writer relationship as a 'mutually respectful companionship'. The importance of the teacher's role in helping students to become discriminating readers had been instilled in him by Osborn and he pursued that end in the classroom and beyond. His experiences led to landmark books that related his experiences and offered techniques for developing meaningful conversations about literature between young people and adults. These included The Reluctant Reader (1969) and Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children (1985). The fifth book in the Dance sequence, Postcards from No Man's Land, won the Carnegie medal in 1999, and the final novel, This Is All, was published in 2005. Chambers's fiction was acknowledged particularly in the Netherlands and US, where he won several literary awards. His contribution to children's literature was recognised by the International Board on Books for Young People in 2002 with the biennial Hans Christian Andersen award. He worked frequently in Australia, where, in the early 1990s, he and a Perth-based bookseller established a short-lived Anglo-Australian imprint, Turton & Chambers, which specialised in translations of European children's books into English, and some original English-language books. Although private, and in some ways a loner, he engaged with colleagues and friends throughout the world who shared his staunch defence of the integrity of 'youth fiction' as a literature worth studying and preserving in its own right, with its own poetics and aesthetics. This was against a sense that young adult fiction so rigidly reflected the angst of the era it reflected that it became outdated rapidly and deserved to be discarded. I was fortunate to have encountered Aidan in my teens – as a fan – and remain indebted to his ongoing influence and encouragement. Of Chambers's other books, The Present Takers (1983) stands out as an enduring, outstanding novel for upper primary-level readers about the nature of responsibility and control. His final book was a privately published youth novel, Today I Did Nothing (2023). He is survived by Nancy, with whom he was awarded the Eleanor Farjeon award for outstanding services to children's literature in 1982. Aidan Chambers, teacher and writer, born 27 December 1934; died 11 May 2025