Margaret Mahy
Margaret Mahy was a well-known New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. While the plots of many of her books have strong supernatural elements, her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up.
Her books The Haunting and The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance both received the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association. There have 100 children's books, 40 novels, and 20 collections of her stories published. Among her children's books, A Lion in the Meadow and The Seven Chinese Brothers and The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate are considered national classics. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan and Afrikaans. In addition, some stories have been translated into Russian, Chinese and Icelandic.
For her contributions to children's literature she was made a member of the Order of New Zealand. The Margaret Mahy Medal Award was established by the New Zealand Children's Book Foundation in 1991 to provide recognition of excellence in children's literature, publishing and literacy in New Zealand. In 2006 she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award (known as the Little Nobel Prize) in recognition of a "lasting contribution to children's literature".
Margaret Mahy died on 23 July 2012.
On 29 April 2013, New Zealand’s top honour for children’s books was renamed the New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret...
“Pulverized by literature,' thought Miss Laburnum. 'The ideal way for a librarian to die.”
“I don't know everything I feel, but I do know this. You mustn't ever want anyone but me, Big Science. If you look at any other girl I'll kill her.”
“Fear can give you urgent wings.”
“It’s so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.”
“Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine,innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have a quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin.”
“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren't there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer! And what's the use of getting rid of - of wickedness, say - in the outside world if you let it creep back into things from inside you?”
“Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I'm sharing my name with you. I'm putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don't listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy. you'll make a hole in him through which he'll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we'll smile together, me inside, you outside. We'll crush him between our smiles.”
“Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.”
“Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.”
“I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it?”
“Will you still love me when I'm a monster?”
“What's happened to the world? she was thinking. Everything has turned terrible...and the bits that aren't terrible have gone mad. I don't understand anything anymore.”
“All right," said Eden. "After all, we've got to hide somewhere. And even if they move on a bit faster than we can, they'll still leave signs, won't they?"Yes, they'll drip blood and leave echoes of people laughing," said Timon in a dark voice. Eden looked at him apprehensively. But then Timon laughed himself. "Joking! Joking! Only joking!" he cried, and Eden nodded, echoing his laughter rather uncertainly.”
“It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.”
“For in some ways the world was like a shopping centre, and he himself was a doubtful customer, often ineffectual, being talked into buying things he didn't want, things indeed which nobody in their right mind would want to buy.”
“When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again.”