Alan Gilliland

A Potted History:

Born in Malaya in 1949 and brought up on a garrisoned rubber plantation during the ‘Emergency’, Alan Gilliland’s first, mountaintop, boarding school was reached by means of a 1930’s American armour-plated car, WWII Dakota aeroplane and Saracen armoured personnel carrier. A year later, aged six, he was transferred to a new school, memories of whose white hot sandy beaches were to remain ingrained upon his psyche long after leaving for this drizzly island we call home. With his departure, Malaysia became independent and its anti-colonialist insurgency lost its rationale. Alan quickly learned the uses of the cricket bat, macintosh and other essentials of integration into English society. Performing passably well throughout his boarding-school years, he fell at the final hurdle, being expelled for revising for his art A-level exam.    Undeterred by this setback, he did not go to art college, preferring devious paths to the realisation of his creative ambitions via film-making, architecture, photo-journalism, newspaper cartooning and news information graphics – with 18 years and 19 awards as graphics editor of The DailyTelegraph – before finally arriving at the decision to write and illustrate fictions less ordinary than his own life.  Casting himself adrift with his long-suffering wife upon a tiny barque of of talent with its pencil-mast, he draws from the very winds the inspiration to fill the sheets and carry them across the ocean of scepticism that lies between hope and fulfillment.  On the shoreline, his six children and three grandchildren, wave their little hankies, litorally wondering if ever he will make it.

His former boss at the Daily Telegraph, Sir Max Hastings said of him:
“… an exceptionally gifted artist and illustrator… I can endorse as simply ‘the best’,”

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Featured Books, with extracts by Alan Gilliland

The Amazing Adventures of Curd The Lion and Us! in the Land at the Back of Beyond
Alan Gilliland
Reminiscent of the writing of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, this brilliant debut children's novel is completely unputdownable as well as being almost uncategorisable.  The author has succeeded in delivering on a book that incorporates a terrifically funny yet mysterious story, full...
Featured in: 11+ readers | 7+ readers | 9+ readers | Books for Boys | Bookshelf Essentials
Format: Hardback - Released: 20/10/2008
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