- Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson was born on the 16th of December 1927
- He was an English author and poet, best known for children’s books and detective stories
- Dickinson won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for both Tulku (1979) and City of Gold (1980), each being recognised as the year’s outstanding children’s book by a British subject
- Through 2012 he is one of seven writers to win two Carnegies; no one has won three
- Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), the second of the four sons of a man in the colonial service and a farmer’s daughter
- As a child he loved stories about knights in armour and explorers, such as Ivanhoe and King Solomon’s Mines, and read “anything by Kipling”, who influenced his writing greatly
- His parents moved to England so that he and his brothers could attend English schools
- His father died suddenly but Dickinson entered Saint Ronan’s prep school in 1936 with support from the family
- For years he listed manual labour as one pastime; at 85 he listed only bridge and gardening
- He died after an illness on 16 December 2015, his 88th birthday
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