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Born in Brighton, England, on July 24, 1921, Leon Garfield is often considered to have authored books on a par with those written by Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. He was married to children’s author Vivien Alcock, whom he met while she drove ambulance and he served in the British Army Medical Corps during World War II. When the War was over, Mr. Garfield worked as a lab technician in the hospital until his career as an author enabled him to work solely as a writer in the 1960s.
He wrote books such as Jack Holborn (his first, and a pirate novel, published in 1962), Mr. Corbett’s Ghost, and Black Jack (1981), which was made into a feature-length film that was a co-winner at the Cannes Film Festival. He was awarded the Carnegie Medal for The God Beneath the Sea and the Whitbread Award for John Diamond in 1980.
Leon Garfield died in 1996.