Cooper was born in 1935 in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to Ethel May (née Field) and her husband John Richard Cooper.[4] Her father had worked in the reading room of the Natural History Museum until going off to fight in the Second World War, from which he returned with a wounded leg. He then pursued a career in the offices of the Great Western Railway. Her mother was a teacher of ten-year-olds and eventually became deputy head of a large school. Her younger brother Roderick also grew up to become a writer.[4]
Cooper emigrated to the United States in 1963 to marry Nicholas J. Grant, a professor of metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a widower with three teenage children.[4] She had two children with him, Jonathan Roderick Howard Grant (b. 1965) and Katharine Mary Grant (b. 1966; later Katharine Glennon). She then became a full-time writer, focusing on The Dark Is Rising and on Dawn of Fear (1970), a novel based on her experiences of the Second World War. Eventually she wrote fiction for both children and adults, a series of picture books, film screenplays, and works for the stage.
Around the time of writing Seaward (1983), both of her parents died, and her marriage to Grant was dissolved.[4]
In July 1996, she married the Canadian-American actor and her sometime co-author Hume Cronyn, the widower of Jessica Tandy. (Cronyn and Tandy had starred in the Broadway production of Foxfire, written by Cooper and Cronyn and staged in 1982.)[7]
After Cronyn's death in 2003, she moved back to Massachusetts, building a house facing the North River in Marshfield,[8] and also living in Cambridge.[9] The history of the Marshfield area was the basis for her 2013 book Ghost Hawk, in which the spirit of a Wampanoag, whose people were decimated by European disease, witnesses the transformation of Massachusetts by the Plymouth Colony.[10]
HollywoodadaptedThe Dark Is Rising (1973) as a film in 2007, The Seeker.[11]
Before she saw the film, Cooper stated that she had requested some changes to it, but had received no response.[12]
In 2019 she published The Shortest Day, based on her performance poem of the same title written for the Cambridge Christmas Revels in the 1970s.[8]
Awards
For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer, Cooper was U.S. nominee in 2002 for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition available to creators of children's books.[16][17]
The American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award recognises one writer and a particular body of work for "significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature". Cooper won the award in 2012 citing the five Dark Is Rising novels, published 1965 to 1977. The citation observed, "In one of the most influential epic high fantasies in literature, Cooper evokes Celtic and Arthurian mythology and masterly world-building in a high-stakes battle between good and evil, embodied in the coming of age journey of Will Stanton."[2]
J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (London: Heinemann, 1970) – biography of the English writer and socialist John Boynton Priestley[21]
The Magic Maker: A Portrait of John Langstaff and His Christmas Revels (Candlewick Press, 2011) – juvenile biography of John Langstaff, founder of the Revels performances[22]
Other nonfiction
Behind the Golden Curtain: A View of the USA (Hodder & Stoughton and Scribner's, 1965)[20]
Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children (Simon & Schuster, 1996)[20]
Drama
Foxfire, Cooper and Hume Cronyn (Samuel French Inc, 1982), stage playbook[20] – produced on Broadway as Foxfire (1982)[7] – based on the Foxfire books
Cooper wrote four screenplays produced for television, one supernatural tale for children and three more adaptations of books about Appalachia (as Foxfire).[20]
Dark Encounter (Shadows, Series 2; Thames Television, 1976)
The Shortest Day (2019), illustrated by Carson Ellis
Short fiction
"Muffin", Amy Ehrlich, ed., When I Was Your Age: Original Stories about Growing Up (Volume 1) (Candlewick) – story set in World War II England (as Dawn of Fear)
"Ghost Story", Don't Read This! (US, Front Street), Fingers on the Back of the Neck (UK, Puffin) – collection supporting IBBY
Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out (Candlewick) – Cooper wrote one piece of this mixed-genre NCBLA collaboration
The Exquisite Corpse Adventure (Candlewick) – Cooper wrote one episode of this sequential story collaboration of children's authors and illustrators by NCBLA for the LC website
"The Caretakers", Haunted (Anderson Press collection, UK only)
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Chaston, Joel D. (1996). "Susan (Mary) Cooper". In Caroline C. Hunt (ed.). Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 161: British Children's Writers Since 1960: First Series. Detroit: Gale. Retrieved 5 August 2013. (subscription required)
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One repeated source of biographical data is Susan Cooper, Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children, Margaret K. McElderry (date?). ISBN0-689-80736-8.
Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, Charles Butler (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)
The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, Leonard Marcus (Candlewick, 2006)