Author. She received world-wide acclaimed as an award-winning English author in the 20th century, excelling mainly in children's books. In 1959 her very first award was the Carnegie Medal for Literature in Children's Books, "The Lantern Bearers,” which was the second book in a trilogy. The Carnegie Medal is the oldest and most prestigious award offered for children's books in England. She has been recommended for this award five times with “Tristan and Iseult” being first runner-up in 1972. Many of her books have Roman Britain and Arthurian themes. After publishing 46 children's books, she is considered one of the top authors of historical novels for children as well as adults. At the early age of nearly three, she was diagnosed with Still's Disease, an idiopathic form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis characterized with frequent high temperatures, an orange skin rash, and crippling deformities of the joints, which eventually included her neck, spine and facial joints. She was wheelchair bound most of her life. She wrote about being disabled in her 1958 novel, “Warrior Scarlet,” which had a main character of a boy with a deformed arm living in Britain's Bronze Age. Born the daughter of a navel officer, she was home schooled due to her chronic illness and always behind in her studies. Her mother would read her Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling along with Celtic stories, but she refused to read herself until she was nine. After her painful operations, she often had to recuperate in a nursing home with only the elderly for company. The family moved to various naval bases about the United Kingdom and Malta, and while her father was deployed out to sea and during World War II, her mother was her complete caregiver. After being sent to Bideford School of Art in Devon at the age of fourteen, she learned that she was a talented artist. She became a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. In 1945 she started writing for publication and was commissioned to write a children's book about the legend of Robin Hood. Her first novel was “The Queen Elizabeth Story” and followed by “The Chronicles of Robin Hood” with both being published in 1950. By her fifth novel, “Simons,” she was writing more complex, detailed themes and was being recognized as an author by the critics. Her success in authoring adult books includes “Sword at Sunset,” which reached the top of the bestseller list in the United Kingdom. She was the recipient of the Other Award for Radical Women's Fiction for her 1978 adult novel, “The Song for a Dark Queen.” The “Blue Remembered Hills” was her 1983 memoir of her childhood and early adulthood before she was an author. In her memoir she told about how demanding she was as a child and how the arsenic in her medicine caused her to have hallucinations. In 1975 she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to children’s literature, and in 1992 was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Released in 2011, ”The Eagle” is a film adoption of her first of her trilogy novels, “The Eagle of the Nine.” Her mother died in the 1960s, her father died in the early 1980s and after their death, she had a live-in housekeeper to help her and her two small dogs for company. She did manage a trip to Greece. On the morning she died, she had two novels waiting for her publisher and was writing in longhand the draft of a third. Other awards that she received were the Boston-Globe Horn Book Award in 1972 for “Tristan and Iseult,” the Hans Christian Andersen Award High Commended in 1974, and the Phoenix Children's Book Award in 1985 for “The Mark of the Horse Lord” and again in 2001 for “The Shining Company.” She never married.