Susan Cooper

Life

Susan Mary Cooper was born on 23 May 1935 in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, then a village west of London, and grew up there during the Second World War, when the sound of bombers and the fear of invasion fed a lifelong sense of the Dark pressing against ordinary life. Her grandmother's home in Aberdyfi, on the Welsh coast, gave her another landscape she would return to in fiction.

She won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read English, attended lectures by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and became the first woman to edit the university newspaper Cherwell. After graduating she joined The Sunday Times, working as a reporter and feature writer under Ian Fleming. In 1963 she moved to the United States to marry Nicholas J. Grant, a professor at MIT; they had two children and later divorced. She wrote plays and screenplays as well as books, including, with the actor Hume Cronyn, the television film The Dollmaker (1984). Cooper and Cronyn married in 1996; he died in 2003. She has continued to live and write in Massachusetts, receiving the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2012, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2013, and the Damon Knight Grand Master award in 2024.

Work

Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) began as an entry for a publisher's competition for family adventure stories: three children on holiday in Cornwall find an ancient map and join a race for the Holy Grail against sinister agents of the Dark, guided by their mysterious great-uncle Merriman Lyon. Only years later, homesick for England in America, did Cooper see it as the start of something larger. The Dark Is Rising (1973) changed everything. On his eleventh birthday, at midwinter, Will Stanton discovers that he is the last of the Old Ones, immortal servants of the Light, and must gather six Signs against the rising of the Dark during a terrifying Buckinghamshire winter. It was a Newbery Honor book.

Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975) — set in the Welsh mountains and awarded the 1976 Newbery Medal — and Silver on the Tree (1977) completed the sequence, drawing together the children of the first book, Will, the Welsh boy Bran (revealed as the son of King Arthur), and the full weight of Arthurian and Celtic legend for a final battle. Together they form The Dark Is Rising. Cooper went on to write the Boggart books, King of Shadows (1999) and Ghost Hawk (2013).

Legacy

The Dark Is Rising is a landmark of Children's & YA Fantasy and of Arthurian Fantasy, and one of the richest uses of The Mabinogion and British folklore — Herne the Hunter, the Wild Hunt, the Lady of the Lake — alongside Lloyd Alexander's Prydain and Alan Garner's novels. Its distinctive move, the ancient war of Light and Dark erupting into a modern village at Christmas, anticipated much of later Urban Fantasy and the hidden-world fantasy of Harry Potter.

Cooper is not on Gygax's Appendix N, and no D&D rules or monsters are drawn from her books; there has been no significant licensed game of the sequence. Her connection to games is a matter of shared roots rather than direct influence: the same Arthurian and Welsh material that runs through King Arthur Pendragon and the Celtic realm of Dark Age of Camelot, and the same idea of an ordinary child discovering a destined role that became the chosen-one premise of so many fantasy games. A 2007 film, The Seeker, stripped out most of what made the book distinctive and was poorly received. The book has fared better on radio, where a 2022 BBC dramatization introduced Will Stanton to a new generation.