29-04-2025
Jane Gardam obituary: novelist who won the Whitbread award twice
Jane Gardam once said, 'The best sound in the world is a child laughing out loud at a book.'
It was a sound she much elicited as an award-winning author whose deliciously arch stories were compared to Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield, was never out of print, and bestrode a hinterland between children's fiction and the adults who never grew out of her.
Indeed, many of her present-day grown-up readers began with her books for children like The Hollow Land (1981) for which she won the Whitbread Literary Award, or her Kit stories (1983, 1986 and 1998). The first paragraph of the latter might just as easily have been the start of one of her short stories for adults: 'The Kit was not a kitten.
