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Kevin John William Crossley-Holland (born 7 February 1941) is an English children's author and poet.

Born in Mursley, north Buckinghamshire, Holland grew up in Whiteleaf, a small village in the Chilterns. He attended Bryanston School in Dorset, followed by St Edmund Hall at Oxford University, where after failing his first exams he discovered a passion for Anglo-Saxon literature. After graduating he became the Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, and from 1972—1977, he lectured in Anglo-Saxon for the Tufts University of London program. He also taught in the Midwest of America as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at St. Olaf College, as well as Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of St. Thomas.

His writing career began when he began working as a poetry, fiction and children’s book editor for Macmillan Publishers. He later become editorial director at Victor Gollancz. He is well-known for his poetry, novels, story collections, translations such as the classic Beowulf (1968, 1973, 1999) and reinterpretations of medieval legends such as his Arthur trilogy. He also writes definitive collections of Norse myths (Viking!: Myths of Gods and Monsters) and British and Irish folk-tales (The Magic Lands: Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland). He has edited and translated the riddles from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book.

He has also written the libretti for two operas by Nicola LeFanu, The Green Children (1966) and The Wildman (1976), as well as a chamber opera about Nelson, Haydn and Emma Hamilton; and a stage play — The Wuffings (1999), as well as several collaborations with composers Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias.

Holland now lives on the North Norfolk coast, where he spent some of his childhood.

His autobiography, The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood, was published in 2009.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Kevin Crossley-Holland", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0