Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper (born 1935) is an English-born author of children's fantasy, best known for The Dark Is Rising sequence, whose fourth volume, The Grey King, won the Newbery Medal in 1976.

Born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, on 23 May 1935, she read English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was the first woman to edit the student paper Cherwell, and then worked as a reporter on The Sunday Times under Ian Fleming. Her first book was Mandrake (1964), a science fiction novel for adults. In 1963 she moved to the United States on marrying the MIT metallurgist Nicholas Grant, and she has lived there since; in 1996 she married the actor Hume Cronyn, with whom she wrote the play Foxfire and the television film The Dollmaker.

The Dark Is Rising sequence comprises Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975) and Silver on the Tree (1977). The Dark Is Rising was a 1974 Newbery Honor book, and both The Grey King and Silver on the Tree won the Welsh Tir na n-Og Award. Later books include Dawn of Fear (1970), Seaward (1983) and King of Shadows (1999). In 2012 the American Library Association gave her the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her contribution to young adult literature.

For collectors

The key book is the first edition of Over Sea, Under Stone, published by Jonathan Cape in London in May 1965 with a jacket by Margery Gill, after twenty or more publishers had turned it down. The first American edition followed from Harcourt, Brace and World in 1966, and Atheneum in New York published the four later volumes from 1973 to 1977.