The recognition that every author craves, however, is simply being read, and King has always had that in abundance. This year King was also belatedly awarded an Arctic Cross medal for his role in the Arctic convoys, the naval operation to ship goods to Russia during the second world war, which was described by Churchill as "the worst journey in the world". King's best-known book is the subject of a Radio 4 documentary, Stig at Fifty, to be broadcast on Christmas Day and Stig will also be read by Andrew Lincoln on Radio 4 Extra in the week after Christmas. A slow-burning success, Stig of the Dump missed out on the Carnegie Medal when it was published in 1963 and failed to win the "Puffin of Puffins" (which went to Eoin Colfer's modern bestseller Artemis Fowl) when the children's imprint celebrated its 70th birthday three years ago.īut recognition, in a variety of forms, may be belatedly arriving.
King, who lives a somewhat ascetic existence with his second wife, Penny, in their mostly self-built home on the edge of a Norfolk marsh, has never enjoyed enormous acclaim.
King's ability to be some years ahead of current thinking on everything from immigration to hunting may be one reason why Stig is still in print, and perhaps more pertinent than ever. Other social trends and attitudes examined by the 89-year-old author in the 16 books he has written for young people have also resurfaced as contemporary concerns. Like Stig, who is 50 years old this year, King was an exemplar of recycling long before it became fashionable. The author of Stig of the Dump doesn't exactly live like a rubbish-tip dwelling caveman – as far as I can tell, King's water supply is not acquired via a bicycle mudguard feeding rainwater through a vacuum cleaner tube into an old can of weedkiller – but it is easy to see from where his stone-age creation acquired his ingenuity. If ever a house embodied one of the strangest and most enduring characters of children's literature, it is Clive King's.
T he kitchen units are oak panels from an old library, the floors are salvaged wooden blocks from a former laboratory and an old milk churn is a walking-stick holder.
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