Visit her Facebook pages: Okay, the first thing to keep in mind is that Susan Cooper wrote these books long before JK Rowling was writing, so if you see the parallels of an English boy who discovers he has magical powers on his eleventh birthday.well, you just have to suck it up and admit that Cooper did it first. Recent books include the collaborative project 'The Exquisite Corpse Adventure' and her biography of Jack Langstaff titled 'The Magic Maker.' Her newest book is 'Ghost Hawk.' When Cooper is not working, she enjoys playing piano, gardening, and traveling. She has also written books for adults, as well as plays and Emmy-nominated screenplays, many in collaboration with the actor Hume Cronyn, whom she married in 1996.

By that time, Susan Cooper had been living in America for 13 years, having moved to marry her first husband, an American professor, and was stepmother to three children and the mother of two.Ĭooper went on to write other well-received novels, including 'The Boggart' (and its sequel 'The Boggart and the Monster'), 'King of Shadows', and 'Victory,' as well as several picture books for young readers with illustrators such as Ashley Bryan and Warwick Hutton.

After attending Oxford, where she became the first woman to ever edit that university's newspaper, Cooper worked as a reporter and feature writer for London's Sunday Times her first boss was James Bond creator Ian Fleming.Ĭooper wrote her first book for young readers in response to a publishing house competition 'Over Sea, Under Stone' would later form the basis for her critically acclaimed five-book fantasy sequence, 'The Dark Is Rising.' The fourth book in the series, 'The Grey King,' won the Newbery Medal in 1976. As a child, she loved to read, as did her younger brother, who also became a writer. Susan Cooper was born in 1935, and grew up in England's Buckinghamshire, an area that was green countryside then but has since become part of Greater London. Susan Cooper's latest book is the YA novel 'Ghost Hawk' (2013)

The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper