彼得·金迪生

彼得·马尔科姆·德布里萨克·迪克森，OBE，FRSL（英语：Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson，1927年12月16日—2015年12月16日），英国儿童文学、推理小说作家和诗人。迪克森曾获颁卡内基奖以及入围汉斯·克里斯蒂安·安徒生奖。

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson OBE FRSL (16 December 1927 – 16 December 2015) was an English author and poet, best known for children's books and detective stories.

Dickinson won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for both Tulku (1979) and City of Gold (1980), each being recognised as the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject. Through 2020 he is one of eight writers to win two Carnegies; no one has won three.

He was also a highly commended runner-up

for Eva (1988) and four times a commended runner-up.

For his contributions as a children's writer Dickinson was a finalist for the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2000.

Life

Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), the second of the four sons of a man in the colonial service and a farmer's daughter. As a child he loved stories about knights in armour and explorers, such as Ivanhoe and King Solomon's Mines, and read "anything by Kipling", who influenced his writing greatly.

His parents moved to England so that he and his brothers could attend English schools. His father died suddenly but Dickinson entered Saint Ronan's prep school in 1936 with support from the family. His novel Hindsight is based on the period in Devon after the school was evacuated from Kent during the war. He entered Eton College in 1941.

Dickinson remained at Eton until 1946. After completing his national service (1946–48), he studied at King's College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951. For seventeen years he worked as assistant editor, resident poet and reviewer for Punch magazine. His first two books were published in 1968 and were very well received, one mystery for adults and one science fiction for children. He completed sequels to both debut novels and left Punch to be a full-time author next year. He continued to write poetry for entertainment and occasionally on commission.

Dickinson married Mary Rose Barnard in 1953; the couple had two daughters and two sons including the children's editor and publisher Philippa Dickinson and the writer John Dickinson. Mary Rose died in 1988.

In 1983, Dickinson had met Robin McKinley, an American author of fantasy, some written for children. After a long friendship, they married in 1991. She said in 2009 that she cannot judge the literary work of people she likes personally, but: "Fortunately I had been passionately devoted to his books years before I met him so I can merely go on thinking they're wonderful and he's brilliant now."

Dickinson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours. He was also chairman of the Society of Authors.

For years he listed manual labour as one pastime; at 85 he listed only bridge and gardening. He died after an illness on 16 December 2015, his 88th birthday.

Writer

Dickinson published almost fifty books, which fall into three general categories: crime fiction for adults (including the James Pibble series), speculative and supernatural fiction for older children, and simpler children's books. One of his few other books was the collection Chance, Luck and Destiny (1975), which he calls "prose and verse, fact and fiction, on the themes of the title". It won the second annual Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children's nonfiction in 1977.

The "Changes" trilogy comprises three early books for children, The Weathermonger, Heartsease and The Devil's Children (1968 to 1970). It was heavily adapted in 1975 as a BBC TV series, The Changes. The trilogy was written in reverse order: The Devil's Children is actually the first book in terms of the trilogy's chronology, Heartsease the second, and The Weathermonger the third.