William Horwood
William Horwood was born in Oxford, England, in May 1944 and raised on the East Kent coast, mostly in Deal, the setting for his memoir The Boy with No Shoes. His family was what is now called dysfunctional and riven by parental separation, secret illegitimacy, alcoholism and genteel poverty. It was also intellectually exciting, creative and in a crazy way filled with positive sibling rivalry and love. William wouldn’t have missed it, or living near the sea, for the world.
At six, when his mother had a breakdown, he went into foster care; at ten he was sent to school in Germany; at eleven he went to Grammar School; at 14, inspired by reading The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, he decided to become a writer and never wavered from that goal. At eighteen, after a nine month tramp around the British Isles camping wild, he took up his place at Bristol University to read Geography.
A lot of jobs followed: fund-raising for the student charity World University Service; teaching; selling recruitment advertising; writing for trade magazines and finally working for the London Daily Mail as editor of Money Mail and then Femail. He resigned from the paper in 1978 aged 34 to finally write his first novel. Duncton Wood, an anthropomorphic saga with moles as the protagonists, was an instant bestseller. Sixteen more novels, including five Dunctons, four critically acclaimed sequels to The Wind in the Willows, books about eagles and wolves have followed, as well as SKALLAGRIGG and his memoir.
You don’t need to look beyond his troubled upbringing to work out why William has been married more than once or where some of the themes in his stories come from; and why his six children and two grandchildren are such a great joy.
William is honoured to be a Council Member of the Society of Authors but his most unexpected achievement was winning the all-comers Anglo-Irish Impromptu Speaking Context in Cork in 1995 on the theme ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone’. But given his life history and belief that our primary task in life is to turn negatives into positives, maybe it was not such a hard subject for him to talk about! He writes most days, is happier than he’s ever been, and is more grateful to his readers for their letters of appreciation for his work and the characters he creates – each and every one a part of his own character and personality – than they can ever know!