Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden (1907-1998) was a British novelist and children's writer, the author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books, several of them set in India, where she spent much of her early life. Born Margaret Rumer Godden in Eastbourne on 10 December 1907, she died at Moniaive in Dumfries and Galloway on 8 November 1998.

She grew up in Narayanganj in British India (now Bangladesh), where her father worked for the Brahmaputra Steam Navigation Company, and in 1925 opened a dance school in Calcutta that she ran for about twenty years. Her third novel, Black Narcissus (1939), about English nuns setting up a convent school in a former palace in the Himalayas, was her first bestseller and was filmed by Powell and Pressburger in 1947. Later adult novels include The River (1946), filmed by Jean Renoir, An Episode of Sparrows (1956), The Greengage Summer (1958) and In This House of Brede (1969). Her books for children include The Doll's House (1947) and The Diddakoi (1972), the story of a part-Romani orphan, which won the Whitbread children's award and was adapted by the BBC as Kizzy. She was appointed OBE in 1993.

For collectors

Black Narcissus is the key title: it was first published in 1939 by Peter Davies in London and by Little, Brown in the United States. The Diddakoi first appeared in 1972 from Macmillan in the UK and Viking in the US, with illustrations by Creina Glegg. HarperCollins reissued it in 2002 as Gypsy Girl, so buyers wanting the book under its original title should look for the Macmillan or Viking printings of 1972.