Years active 1948–1999 Awards Eleanor Farjeon Award Died April 17, 2012 | Role Author Name Leila Berg | |
 | ||
Born 12 November 1917 Salford, England, UK Occupation Author, journalist, political activist Website aspects.net/~leilaberg/ Books Risinghill: death of a comprehensive school People also search for John Walmsley, Julius Lester, Mary Rayner, James Riordan | ||
Leila Berg (12 November 1917 – 17 April 2012) was an English children's author. She was known also as a journalist and a writer on education and children's rights.
Contents
Life and politics
She was brought up in Salford, Lancashire, in a Jewish doctor's family; she wrote vividly about this part of her life in Flickerbook (1997), describing also later meetings in Cambridge through her older brother, particularly with Margot Heinemann, and J. B. S. Haldane whom she would reference obliquely in the early Chunky books. She associated with Young Communist League members at the time of the Spanish Civil War (in which she lost two lovers) and eventually joined the movement. Her first job as a journalist was with the British communist daily paper The Daily Worker.
"Empowering children"
Berg was influenced in her thinking by psychologist Susan Isaacs. After working as a journalist in World War II, during which she married and started a family, she began to write children's fiction. She also took an interest in the progressive education advocated by A. S. Neill (Summerhill), Michael Duane (Risinghill) and John Holt ("unschooling").
Berg began writing in a more realistic and gritty style, for younger children, in the 1960s, in the Nippers series of readers. This was an influential move designed to bring children's books closer to ordinary, real, urban life, and away from the Janet and John reader style (and probably the cosiness of Enid Blyton's world, a ubiquitous influence in the period). She became children's editor for the publisher Methuen. As she put it: All my life I have sought to empower children (speech at the University of Essex, at an honorary degree ceremony).
She was awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Award in 1974.
Leila Berg died on 17 April 2012.