roald dahl biography youtube

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Roald Dahl quick bio

Do you know Roald Dahl, the author of lots of great kids books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ? Find out about his life in this video!

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Preparation

Little Roald was born on the 13th of September 1916. 

As a kid, he wasn't particularly known for his writing! But many of his childhood experiences came to inspire his stories years later. For instance, a chocolate maker used to taste-test their new products at Roald's school, and he used to dream of inventing a new chocolate bar! Hmm, sound familiar?

But before becoming an author, Roald Dahl was actually a fighter pilot in World War Two, and later a spy for MI6, working alongside Ian Fleming – the man who created James Bond!

Oh, hello, Ian.

Hello, Roald.

It wasn't until 1943 that Dahl put pencil to his favourite yellow paper and published his first kids' book, The Gremlins , a tale of naughty creatures that cause mechanical problems on planes! Dahl went on to write 16 other kids' books, selling more than 200 million copies worldwide.

Have you read any books by Roald Dahl? Which other books do you like? Tell us about them!

I havent finish the book 'Charlie and the Factory Choclate', but I liked the book. I read only this book. I reading a book 'Sherlok Holms and I like it.

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I have read Matilda (and I have watch the movie), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and I also watched the movie ), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, The Witches, George's Marvellous Medicine, and Danny, the Champion of the World!!! :D

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13 phizz-whizzing facts about Roald Dahl

We’ve put together some fantastic facts about roald dahl’s life, and boy are there some humdingers….

13th September 2020 marks what would have been Roald Dahl’s 104th birthday!

To celebrate all the brilliant books , playful poems and witty words he gave us over the years, we’ve put together some fantastic facts about the author’s life, and boy are there some humdingers…

Did you know that we have a FREE downloadable Roald Dahl primary resource ? Great for teachers, homeschoolers and parents alike!

Roald Dahl facts

1. dahl wrote many of his stories in a little shed at the bottom of his garden.

Known as his ‘writing hut’, Dahl sat in a battered old armchair and penned famous tales such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory .

2. He was a fighter pilot in World War II 

During a flight in a Gloster Gladiator (fighter plane) in 1940 over Libya, Dahl crash landed in the desert and survived – all because he’d been given the wrong directions!

3. Dahl wrote for around four hours every single day

From 10am – 12pm, and then 4pm – 6pm

4. He never learned how to type

Instead, Dahl preferred to do all his writing in an old red book in pencil.

5. When Roald Dahl died in 1990, he was buried with some of his favourite things

Including a power drill, chocolate, snooker cues and of course, his HB pencils.

6. There are strange mementos still sitting in his writing hut

These include a huge ball made of old chocolate wrappers, and a piece of hip bone that he had to have removed!

Quentin Blake illustrated many of Dahl’s much loved books over the years.

7. dahl was a spy.

During World War II he passed intelligence to MI6 from Washington.

8. Dahl invented over 250 new words

There’s even an official Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary to help you tell your snozzcumbers from your snozzberries.

9. Many of Dahl’s characters were based on people he’d met in real life

The grandmother in The Witches is said to be based on Dahl’s mother, and the little girl in The BFG was named after his granddaughter, Sophie. 

10. Dahl was born in Wales, but his parents were Norwegian

As a child, Roald spoke fluent Norwegian and English. He’s even named after the famous Norwegian polar explorer, Roald Amundson.

11. Writing wasn’t his strong point at school

– according to his teachers, anyway!

12. In 1971, a real man named Willy Wonka wrote to Roald Dahl

He was a postman from Nebraska.

13. Roald Dahl was a giant!

Okay, not quite like the ones in his stories, but he was 6 foot 6 inches tall! This earned him the nickname ‘Lofty’ when he served in the RAF.

Which is your favourite Roald Dahl book? Let us know by leaving a comment, below!

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Nice facts and my favourite book is... The BFG

George’s Marvellous Medicine, because it’s SO funny!

Esio Trot is my favourite, because it just is!

its very creative!

thx for the facts

I got the whole collection of Roald Dahl books yesterday, I've already read two and love them! My favourite is Matilda though!

My favorite book: The witches and Charlie and the chocolate factory

I all most read every book he has

Thank you and very interesting

i love roald dahl

The fantastic Mr fox

The Fantastic Mr Fox

Ilove reading his books so much

James and giant peach

wow i did not know that

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii coooooooooolllllllllllllll

My favourite book was the twits

Love the info

I like this info

I love this facts but they can be shorter

I like Matilda

Thanks for the info

he is a auspicious author and i am a fan of him

Fantastic Mr.Fox !!!!

I like matilda

easy to find.

The Twits is my favorite book

My favrourite is Danny The Campion of The world so far. I found out the arthor Roald Dahl when I was in the Op-shop.

My favourite Roal Dahl book is Matilda

My dog is called Sophie my favorite is the bfg

I love Roald Dahl! Matilda is my favourite. And to think writing wasn’t his strong point at school?!

I don't have a favorite because all of them are TRULY AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I loved roald dahl's books , and I have always wanted to meet him. But sadly, he has already past away.

#1 fan roald dahl my 3 favourite books are the twits, matilda and james and the jient peach love you roald xoxoxo

We like the BFG because there are amazing twists about the story.

i love reading Roald Dahl books my fav book is the witches :) :] ps. i love you Roald Dahl

Brilliant I love his books

I love all of Roald Dahls books

the bfg is my favourite. and the little girl is called sophie because his granddaughter sophie used to call him the bfs.

#1 fan! My favourite book is Mischief and Mayham. Your the BEST Roald Dahl.

Roald Dahl is AWESOME! My favourite book is Mischief and Mayham.

My favourite book is CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY Well done Roald Dahl

I love Matilda

Love the facts

I love Roald Dahl

My favorite is Matilda because I like the adventure, the Trunchbull and her super power.

love love love thease amazing books so cool

my favourite is the BFG

I love Roald Dahl books, especially The BFG and Matilda

my favourites are probably The BFG because it is so entertaining and funny. next is Matilda because it has so much in it!

All his books are the MOST BEST BOOKS EVER

BFG because its funny and intresting

I have Roald Dahl audio books... all of them!

My favourite Roald Dahl stories are The witches and The BFG

wow that is a lot of facts about one of my fave author Roald Dahl!!!!! :)

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - because i like chocolate, my dad doesn't like the umpa-lumpas

He is my most favourite author of all times.

I love Matilda!

bfg its awesome

I think number 12 is super cool

my favourite book is the BFG

My fav is Matilda.

Great facts

My favourite book of roald dahl is the witches because it teaches us to not go with strangers.

my favorite roald dahl book is the twits

my favourite Roald Dahl book is the BFG. Fun fact I was born in the same month as Roald Dahl...SEPTEMBER!!!

All of them and thank you for the facts

he was the greatest story teller but how did he die?

I love Roald Daul books!

Matilda is awsome

my favarrite book is the bfg

This is amazing and cool to learn facts about Ronald Dahl !.

cool facts i love it

I like the BFG because he says silly words and blows dreams i wondered where dreams came from.

i like esio trot

my favourite book is danny the champion of the world

BEST FACTS EVER!!!

Amazing Roald dahl is one of my favorite authors eve!!!!

I love Matilda.

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Georges Marvellous Medicine!

Loved his books ( especially the bfg) I knew most of these facts but the others were great to know

James and the giant peach!!!

Matilda is my favourite book

Charlie and the chocolate factory

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Im planning to become a storyteller when I grow up.

I love the BFG!

My favourite book is the BFG

I really like the book Matilda. I like the way Dahl put the characters together. Miss Trunchbull is super freaky and cool at the same time:-)

I love the BFG because of all the hilarious words!

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Charlie and the chocolate factory because it is all about chocolate and I love chocolate.

My favourite book by Roald Dahl is the bfg

Favourite book? How can I choose just one? The BFG is wonderful but Danny the Champion of the World also holds a special place in my heart! A grown up child of 40!

Roal Dhal is an amazing author. My favorite Roal Dhal book is Matilda.

he is 100 today and i went to school first day and i did not know he died in 1990

My favourite Roald Dahl book is Matilda because it is funny and enjoyable and i love reading just like her

the twits is my fav

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Biography of Roald Dahl, British Novelist

The Memorable Author of Iconic Children's Novels

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Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916–November 23, 1990) was a British writer. After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II , he became a world-famous author, particularly due to his best-selling books for children.

Fast Facts: Roald Dahl

• Known For:  English author of children's novels and adult short stories
• Born:  September 13, 1916 in Cardiff, Wales
• Parents:  Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl ( née  Hesselberg)
• Died:  November 23, 1990 in Oxford, England
• Education:  Repton School
• Selected Works:   James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), The BFG (1982), Matilda (1988)
• Spouses:  Patricia Neal (m. 1953-1983), Felicity Crosland (m. 1983)
• Children:  Olivia Twenty Dahl, Chantal Sophia "Tessa" Dahl, Theo Matthew Dahl, Ophelia Magdalena Dahl, Lucy Neal Dahl
• Notable Quote:  “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”

Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1916, in the district of Llandaff. His parents were Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg), both of whom were Norwegian immigrants. Harold had originally immigrated from Norway in the 1880s and lived in Cardiff with his French first wife, with whom he had two children (a daughter, Ellen, and a son, Louis) before her death in 1907. Sofie immigrated later and married Harold in 1911. They had five children, Roald and his four sisters Astri, Alfhild, Else, and Asta, all of whom they raised Lutheran. In 1920, Astri died suddenly of appendicitis, and Harold died of pneumonia only weeks later; Sofie was pregnant with Asta at the time. Instead of returning to her family in Norway, she stayed in the UK, wanting to follow her husband’s wishes to give their children an English education.

As a boy, Dahl was sent to an English public boarding school , St. Peter’s. He was intensely unhappy during his time there, but never let his mother know how he felt about it. In 1929, he moved to Repton School in Derbyshire, which he found equally unpleasant due to the culture of intense hazing and the cruelty with which older students dominated and bullied the younger ones; his hatred for corporal punishment stemmed from his school experiences. One of the cruel headmasters he loathed, Geoffrey Fisher, later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the association somewhat soured Dahl on religion.

Surprisingly, he was not noted as a particularly talented writer during his schoolboy days; in fact, many of his evaluations reflected precisely the opposite. He did enjoy literature, as well as sports and photography. Another of his iconic creations was sparked by his schooling experiences: the Cadbury chocolate company occasionally sent samples of new products to be tested by Repton students, and Dahl’s imagination of new chocolate creations would later turn into his famous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . He graduated in 1934 and took a job with the Shell Petroleum Company; he was sent as an oil supplier to Kenya and Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania).

World War II Pilot

In 1939, Dahl was first commissioned by the army to lead a platoon of indigenous troops as World War II broke out . Soon after, however, he switched to the Royal Air Force , despite having very little experience as a pilot, and underwent months of training before he was deemed fit for combat in the fall of 1940. His first mission, however, went badly awry. After being given instructions that later proved to be inaccurate, he wound up crashing in the Egyptian desert and suffering serious injuries that took him out of combat for several months. He did manage to return to combat in 1941. During this time, he had five aerial victories, which qualified him as a flying ace, but by September 1941, severe headaches and blackouts led to him being invalided home.

Dahl attempted to qualify as an RAF training officer, but instead wound up accepting the post of assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Although unimpressed and uninterested with his diplomatic posting, he became acquainted with C.S. Forester, a British novelist who was tasked with producing Allied propaganda for American audiences. Forester asked Dahl to write down some of his war experiences to be turned into a story, but when he received Dahl’s manuscript, he instead published it as Dahl had written it. He wound up working with other authors, including David Ogilvy and Ian Fleming, to help promote British war interests, and worked in espionage as well, at one point passing information from Washington to Winston Churchill himself.

The knack for children’s stories that would make Dahl famous first appeared during the war as well. In 1943, he published The Gremlins , turning an inside joke in the RAF (“gremlins” were to blame for any aircraft problems) into a popular story that counted Eleanor Roosevelt and Walt Disney among its fans. When the war ended, Dahl had held the rank of wing commander and squadron leader. Several years after the end of the war, in 1953, he married Patricia Neal, an American actress. They had five children: four daughters and one son.

Short Stories (1942-1960)

• "A Piece of Cake" (published as "Shot Down Over Libya," 1942)
• The Gremlins (1943)
• Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946)
• Sometime Never: A Fable for Superman (1948)
• Someone Like You (1953)
• Kiss Kiss (1960)

Dahl’s writing career began in 1942 with his wartime story. Originally, he wrote it with the title “A Piece of Cake,” and it was bought by The Saturday Evening Post for the substantial sum of $1,000. In order to be more dramatic for war propaganda purposes, however, it was renamed “Shot Down Over Libya,” even though Dahl had not, in fact, been shot down, let alone over Libya. His other major contribution to the war effort was The Gremlins , his first work for children. Originally, it was optioned by Walt Disney for an animated film , but a variety of production obstacles (problems with ensuring the rights to the idea of “gremlins” were open, issues with creative control and RAF involvement) led to the project’s eventual abandonment.

As the war came to an end, he kicked off a career writing short stories, mostly for adults and mostly published originally in a variety of American magazines. In the waning years of the war, many of his short stories remained focused on the war, the war effort, and propaganda for the Allies. First published in 1944 in Harper’s Bazaar , “Beware of the Dog” became one of Dahl’s most successful war stories and eventually was loosely adapted into two different movies.

In 1946, Dahl published his first short story collection. Entitled Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying , the collection includes most of his war-era short stories . They’re notably different from the more famous works he’d later write; these stories were clearly rooted in the wartime setting and were more realistic and less quirky. He also tackled his first (of what would only be two) adult novels in 1948. Some Time Never: A Fable for Supermen was a work of dark speculative fiction, combining the premise of his children’s story The Gremlins with a dystopian future imagining worldwide nuclear war. It was largely a failure and has never been reprinted in English. Dahl returned to short stories, publishing two consecutive short story collections: Someone Like You in 1953 and Kiss Kiss in 1960.

Family Struggles and Children’s Stories (1960-1980)

• James and the Giant Peach (1961)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
• The Magic Finger (1966)
• Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl (1969)
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970)
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
• Switch Bitch (1974)
• Danny the Champion of the World (1975)
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1978)
• The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
• The Best of Roald Dahl (1978)
• My Uncle Oswald (1979)
• Tales of the Unexpected (1979)
• The Twits (1980)
• More Tales of the Unexpected (1980)

The beginning of the decade included some devastating events for Dahl and his family. In 1960, his son Theo’s baby carriage was hit by a car, and Theo nearly died. He suffered from hydrocephalus, so Dahl collaborated with engineer Stanley Wade and neurosurgeon Kenneth Till to invent a valve that could be used to improve treatment. Less than two years later, Dahl's daughter, Olivia, died at age seven from measles encephalitis. As a result, Dahl became a staunch proponent of vaccinations and he also began questioning his faith—a well-known anecdote explained that Dahl was dismayed at an archbishop’s remark that Olivia’s beloved dog could not join her in heaven and began questioning whether or not the Church really was so infallible. In 1965, his wife Patricia suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms during her fifth pregnancy, requiring her to relearn basic skills like walking and talking; she did recover and eventually returned to her acting career.

Meanwhile, Dahl was becoming more and more involved in writing novels for children. James and the Giant Peach , published in 1961, became his first iconic children’s book, and the decade saw several more publications that would go on to endure for years. His 1964 novel, though, would be arguably his most famous: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . The book received two film adaptations, one in 1971 and one in 2005, and a sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator , in 1972. In 1970, Dahl published The Fantastic Mr. Fox , another of his more famous children’s stories.

During this time, Dahl continued to turn out short story collections for adults as well. Between 1960 and 1980, Dahl published eight short story collections, including two “best of” style collections. My Uncle Oswald , published in 1979, was a novel using the same character of the lecherous “Uncle Oswald” who featured in a few of his earlier short stories for adults. He also continuously published new novels for children, which soon surpassed the success of his adult works. In the 1960s, he also briefly worked as a screenwriter, most notably adapting two Ian Fleming novels into films: the James Bond caper You Only Live Twice and the children’s movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang .

Later Stories for Both Audiences (1980-1990)

• George's Marvelous Medicine (1981)
• The BFG (1982)
• The Witches (1983)
• The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985)
• Two Fables (1986)
• Matilda (1988)
• Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: The Country Stories of Roald Dahl (1989)
• Esio Trot (1990)
• The Vicar of Nibbleswick (1991)
• The Minpins (1991)

By the early 1980s, Dahl’s marriage to Neal was falling apart. They divorced in 1983, and Dahl remarried that same year to Felicity d’Abreu Crosland, an ex-girlfriend. Around the same time, he caused some controversy with his remarks centered on Tony Clifton's picture book  God Cried , which depicted the siege of West Beirut by Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War. His comments at the time were widely interpreted as antisemitic , although others in his circle interpreted his anti-Israel comments as non-malicious and more targeted at the conflicts with Israel.

Among his most famous later stories are 1982’s The BFG and 1988’s Matilda . The latter book was adapted into a much-beloved film in 1996, as well as an acclaimed stage musical in 2010 on the West End and 2013 on Broadway. The last book released while Dahl was still alive was Esio Trot , a surprisingly sweet children’s novel about a lonely old man trying to connect with a woman he has fallen in love with from afar.

Literary Styles and Themes

Dahl was far and away best known for his very particular and unique approach to children’s literature . Certain elements in his books are easily traced to his ugly experiences at boarding school during his youth: villainous, terrifying adults in positions of power who hate children, precocious and observant children as protagonists and narrators, school settings, and plenty of imagination. Although the boogeymen of Dahl’s childhood certainly made plenty of appearances—and, crucially, were always defeated by the children—he also tended to write token “good” adults as well.

Despite being famous for writing for children, Dahl’s sense of style is famously a unique hybrid of the whimsical and the gleefully macabre. It’s a distinctively child-centric approach, but one with a subversive undertone to its obvious warmth. The details of his antagonists’ villainy are often described in childlike but nightmarish detail, and the comic threads in stories such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are laced with dark or even violent moments. Gluttony is a particular target for Dahl’s sharply violent retribution, with several notably fat characters in his canon receiving disturbing or violent ends.

Dahl’s language is notable for its playful style and intentional malapropisms . His books are littered with new words of his own invention, often created by switching around letters or mix-and-matching existing sounds to make words that still made sense, even though they weren’t real words. In 2016, for the centenary of Dahl's birth, lexicographer Susan Rennie created  The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary , a guide to his invented words and their “translations” or meanings.

Near the end of his life, Dahl was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare cancer of the blood, typically affecting older patients, that occurs when blood cells do not “mature” into healthy blood cells. Roald Dahl died on November 23, 1990, in Oxford, England. He was buried at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, England, in a fittingly unusual fashion: he was buried with some chocolates and wine, pencils, his favorite pool cues, and a power saw. To this day, his grave remains a popular site, where children and adults alike pay tribute by leaving flowers and toys.

Dahl’s legacy largely dwells in the enduring power of his children’s books. Several of his most famous works have been adapted into several different media, from film and television to radio to stage. It’s not just his literary contributions that have continued to have an impact, though. After his death, his widow Felicity continued his charitable work through the Roald Dahl Marvellous Children’s Charity, which supports children with various illnesses throughout the UK. In 2008, the UK charity Booktrust and Children's Laureate Michael Rosen joined forces to create The Roald Dahl Funny Prize, awarded annually to authors of humorous children's fiction. Dahl’s particular brand of humor and his sophisticated yet approachable voice for children’s fiction have left an indelible mark.

• Boothroyd, Jennifer.  Roald Dahl: A Life of Imagination . Lerner Publications, 2008.
• Shavick, Andrea.  Roald Dahl: The Champion Storyteller . Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Sturrock, Donald.  Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl , Simon & Schuster, 2010.
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Roald Dahl Fans

Fan site for author Roald Dahl (1916-1990)

Roald Dahl: His Life and Work

This fantastic introduction to Dahl’s life and work was sent in by Frankie Meehan, an ESL Teacher at United World College of SE Asia, Singapore. If you have any questions, please email him at  [email protected] . Thanks Frankie!

Read the text and then answer the questions that follow it.

Roald Dahl was born on 13th September, 1916 in Llandaff, South Wales. Dahl’s parents were Norwegian. His father died while Roald was still a child.

Dahl attended Llandaff Cathedral School for just two years. Then from the ages of nine to thirteen he attended St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Weston–super–Mare, England. He did not enjoy the school because many of the teachers were cruel and often caned the students. Dahl was good at cricket and swimming, but he performed poorly in class. One of his main hobbies was reading, and some of his favourite novelists were the adventure writers Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.

When Dahl was thirteen his family moved to Kent in England, and he was sent to Repton Public School. Sadly, Repton was even harsher than his old school. The headmaster enjoyed beating children and the older students used the younger ones as servants. However, there was one good thing about the school. Every few months, the chocolate company, Cadburys, sent boxes of chocolates to Repton for the students to test. This happy memory gave Dahl the idea for his most famous novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

After school, Dahl decided that he wanted to travel. He got a job with the Shell Oil Company and two years later was sent to East Africa. In his autobiography, Going Solo, he recounts some of the exciting adventures there, including the time a black mamba entered his friend’s house and a snake catcher had to be called in.

In 1939, World War 11 started. Dahl joined the RAF (Royal Air Force) and learned to fly warplanes. Unfortunately, on his first flight into enemy territory he ran out of fuel and crashed in the Libyan desert. He fractured his skull but managed to crawl out of the burning plane.

Dahl started writing in the 1940s while based in the USA. His first story was a newspaper account of his air crash. In 1945 he moved back home but in the early fifties returned to America, where he met his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal. They had five children together but got divorced in 1983. Dahl remarried soon after. The last years of his life were very happy and he wrote some of his best books during this period: The BFG, The Witches and Matilda. Roald Dahl died on 23rd November 1990 in Oxford, England.

• How old was Roald Dahl when he died?
• How many schools did he attend?
• How many times was he married?
• How many children did he have?
• Complete the following timeline of Dahl’s life (fill in all the blanks!):

6. Find words in the text with the following meanings:

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock

N o matter how you spin it – and at times Donald Sturrock spins quite hard – Roald Dahl was an absolute sod. Crashing through life like a big, bad child he managed to alienate pretty much everyone he ever met with his grandiosity, dishonesty and spite. Tempered by the desire to be very wealthy, he was able to finesse this native nastiness into a series of compelling books for children who loved to see their anarchic inner world caught on paper. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Fantastic Mr Fox and Matilda all do the work of contemporary folktales, allowing young readers to stray into some very dark places and still get home in time for tea.

When it comes to Dahl's adult fiction , that darkness often tipped over into the distasteful (how he would have hated that word). It's for this reason that the short stories he wrote with the New Yorker in mind during the late 1950s often ended up in Playboy, a publication that valued good, taut prose but didn't balk at an added dash of sexual sadism. It was, in fact, disappointment at the way his fiction writing career had stalled that turned Dahl to writing for children. Even then, there was no fairytale ending. It took seven years for James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to find a UK publisher. In the messy interim, Dahl supported himself by churning out Hollywood scripts which, more often than not, never got made or ended up with someone else's name on them. You Only Live Twice was one of his, as was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang . Naturally, he got into shouting matches over both.

Dahl needed the money not just to fund his habit of greyhounds, modern art and ostentatious present giving: he also famously had the highest medical bills on the planet. The awful New York street accident in 1960 that left his baby son Theo brain-damaged, followed by the catastrophic strokes suffered by his wife, the late American actress Patricia Neal, would have bankrupted all but the richest men. Dahl worked like a demon because he had to, funding a sprawling support system of doctors, nurses and round-the-clock carers, not to mention the more ordinary nannies, housekeepers and gardeners that were required to keep his beloved Gypsy House ticking over. This complicated buttressing allowed him to shuffle off to his writing hut in the garden every morning to keep the money coming in.

This was heroic, of course, as was the way that Dahl refused to take any notice of the doctors' limiting prognostications. Frustrated by the way that the shunt used to drain fluid from Theo's brain kept jamming, Dahl helped to design a better one. Equally "sparky" – his favourite quality in either man or woman – was the way he bullied Neal into regaining her mobility, if not quite all her memory, and set her up for a life that, incredibly, lasted until last month. This was at a time when the doctors had written off the 39-year-old as a badly battered vegetable worth keeping alive simply because of the foetus she was still carrying.

You want to be properly admiring here, but Dahl makes it so difficult. For you can't help feeling that he had, in some important way, got Neal exactly where he wanted her. For years he had been sullen about being known as a movie star's husband; now here was his chance to have his revenge on her in the kind of way that might have been the payoff to one of those short stories that the New Yorker turned down as just too cruel.

This need to be always in charge – not to mention the bouts of anti-semitism, womanising, and a kind of generalised ungraciousness – makes Dahl a tricky customer for a biographer. Especially when, as in the case of Donald Sturrock, he has been chosen by the Dahl family to write the closest thing to an authorised life. Sturrock explains in his introduction that he has had access to thousands of previously unseen letters and drafts. But exactly what concessions he has had to make in return are not clear, and one senses a strain in the book's tone whenever more controversial aspects of his subject's life come into view.

In particular, Sturrock's handling of Dahl's decade-long affair with Felicity Crosland, for whom he eventually left a distraught and still vulnerable Patricia Neal, feels as if it is treading on egg shells. And Sturrock is probably quite right to mind his Ps and Qs, for he only snagged this plum job because Dahl took away the mandate from someone else shortly before his death. His biography was to have been written by his clever young American publisher Stephen Roxburgh, but – the old story – Dahl fell out with him over the editing of Matilda and decided that some punishment was in order. The great man may no longer be with us, but there is something about his slightly malign spirit that means you would not want to cross him even 20 years after his death.

Sturrock's task is made more complicated by the fact that this is not the first scholarly biography to appear. In 1994 Jeremy Treglown published an excellent unauthorised account of Dahl's life that drew on the massive correspondence lodged in his many publishers' and agents' archives around the world. Treglown also, crucially, had access to a garrulous Neal who, while nominally reconciled with Dahl and Crosland, had no particular reason to be nice about them. This first important account of Dahl's life, then, tended at times towards what might politely be called the sceptical, especially when it came to Dahl's persistent mythmaking about his wartime flying experiences and his first marriage.

Certainly by choosing Sturrock as their chronicler the Dahls have appointed someone whose fandom they can count on – as a young BBC producer in the 1980s Sturrock worked on a documentary about Dahl and managed to remain friends with him – and who can be guaranteed to tell the story of his difficult personality as gently as possible. The result is by no means a whitewash, but it is an attempt to nudge the picture in favour of a man who, despite so many reasons to dislike him, remains one of the greatest forces for good in children's literature of the past 50 years.

Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.

• Biography books
• Children and teenagers
• Children's books: 8-12 years

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Roald Dahl Was a WW II Spy and Fighter Pilot Before Becoming a Beloved Children's Book Author

Prior to writing 'James and the Giant Peach,' 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' 'Matilda,' and more, Dahl was a member of the Air Force and involved in a covert spy operation.

It all started during World War II when Dahl left his oil industry job in Tanzania to enlist in the Royal Air Force in 1939. Despite measuring well over six feet, which made it difficult for him to fit into a cockpit, he became a fighter pilot. But on his first excursion he crashed in the Libyan desert (Dahl would later write that he'd been shot down, but it was an accidental crash).

The crash fractured his skull, injured his spine and destroyed his nose. Swelling left him temporarily unable to see, and it took several months for Dahl to recover. But he turned down a chance to go back home to convalesce in the hopes of flying again, and in the spring of 1941, he was cleared to join the battle against the German invasion of Greece.

In this fight, the small number of British planes were vastly outnumbered by German ones, and aerial combat was often deadly for the British pilots. Dahl survived the dangerous flights and took down some of the enemy before it was necessary to retreat. Yet after this, he only flew for a few more weeks. Suffering from increasingly painful headaches and occasional blackouts linked to his earlier injuries, he was deemed unfit to fly.

Dahl became a spy in Washington, D.C.

In 1942, America was a recent ally in World War II. But the country still had many isolationists who were unhappy about joining the fight — some even felt President Franklin D. Roosevelt had conspired to let Pearl Harbor happen in order to push America toward war. As a dashing, wounded fighter pilot, Dahl was sent to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., to help make the case for U.S. involvement in the war.

Dahl could be charming, which won him invitations to dinners and cocktail parties. And he was helped along in society by the friendship of Charles Marsh, a newspaper owner and oil magnate (whose other mentees included Lyndon Johnson ). Eventually, Dahl became involved in the covert spy operation British Security Coordination.

BSC's agents were keeping an eye on U.S. involvement in the war, as well as scoping out any post-war plans the United States might be making. His work as a spy still called for Dahl to attend a lot of dinners and cocktail parties — but now he was reporting the tidbits and gossip he heard to BSC.

He was tight with major political players

When Dahl was invited to visit Hyde Park with President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt , he took notes to pass along to BSC. Among Dahl's other notable friends and acquaintances were Vice President Henry Wallace (the two regularly played tennis) and then-Senator Harry Truman (who Dahl joined for poker games). Dahl also had numerous affairs, including with Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. The congresswoman wasn't an avid supporter of British interests; Dahl may have been directed to encourage her to change these views.

Dahl's friend Marsh inadvertently aided the younger man's espionage when he showed Dahl some papers from Wallace regarding America's plans for the aviation industry once the war was over. Dahl was so intrigued by what he'd read that he arranged for someone to come and take the papers to be copied. While this was happening he lingered by the lavatory to establish an alibi should anyone wonder why it had taken him so long to read the document.

Dahl was valued enough that even when his higher-ups at the embassy didn't want him around any longer — he was a very undiplomatic diplomat who didn't care for office life — BSC arranged for his return to the States. And he had enough pull that he was able to help Ernest Hemingway travel to London, where Dahl served as Hemingway's minder, prior to D-Day.

Dahl nearly made a film with Walt Disney

Being an embassy attaché and spy would seem enough to occupy most people — but Dahl also found time to write while he was posted in the States during World War II. A piece about his crash in Libya impressed writer C.S. Forester so much that he helped Dahl get it published in the Saturday Evening Post .

Another Dahl project was about gremlins. These creatures had a long history within the RAF, often receiving the blame for mechanical failures. Dahl's work on a story about gremlins led to interest from Walt Disney , who began developing an animated feature. Dahl made trips to Hollywood to work on the film (on one occasion dining with Ginger Rogers). But he proved to be a difficult collaborator at times, arguing with Disney about how the gremlins should look. And as commercial prospects for the movie seemed to dim, Disney decided not to make it after all.

Dahl's gremlins did appear in an illustrated book published under the Disney aegis in 1943 (he sent a copy to Eleanor Roosevelt, which helped the two forge their friendship). But this book would be the only children's publication on Dahl's resume for many years to come. It wasn't until he wrote James and the Giant Peach , which was published in the United States in 1961, that he discovered his true calling: writing books for children.

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Roald Dahl Stories

From Sophie's adventures with the BFG and James' journey on the Giant Peach, to Matilda's brilliant bravery and Charlie's first step into the world of Wonka - Roald Dahl stories celebrate the incredible potential of young people and the power of kindness.

(And they really are brilliantly entertaining!)

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Brand new stories featuring Roald Dahl's iconic characters coming later this year! The new publishing includes a story based on The Twits by Greg James and Chris Smith, and a festive short story collection by a variety of acclaimed storytellers based on their favourite Roald Dahl characters.

Roald Dahl in the Classroom

Bring the magic of Roald Dahl stories to life in your classroom with our YPO-sponsored lesson plans, spanning the full curriculum!

Created to align with Key Stage 1 and 2 learning objectives, our free lesson plan are designed to add a touch of Roald Dahl magic to the curriculum, from English, Maths and STEM to Art, PSHE and Geography.

Roald Dahl Stories on Stage

You can see a number of your favourite Roald Dahl stories reimagined for the stage.

Our new Theatre Division has been hard at work with a host of playful and talented songwriters, circus artists and playwrights to create a series of mischievously brilliant new theatre shows.

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre is an independent charity, founded in 2001 by Roald Dahl’s widow, Liccy. Their founding objective as a charity is to further the education of the public in the art of literature and creativity, by running a museum and literature centre based on the works of Roald Dahl. Since the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened their doors in 2005, they have used the example of Roald Dahl’s creative craft to show that what he did, YOU can do too. More than a million people have visited the Museum to date, including an average of 10,000 school children every year.

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Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Quartet Abounds in Audacious Artifice and Stinging Political Critique

By Richard Brody

Wes Anderson’s new quartet of films, based on stories by Roald Dahl , which dropped on Netflix last week, may be brief—three are seventeen minutes long, one runs thirty-nine—but there’s nothing minor about them. They make even clearer what his features have long shown: Anderson is one of the two most original inventors of cinematic forms since the heyday of the late Jean-Luc Godard . The other is the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami . Where Kiarostami undermined the artifices of fiction with documentary elements, Anderson overmines fiction by overloading it with intricate artifices that nonetheless have a quasi-documentary aspect—in that they reveal the contrivances on which filmed fictions depend. Anderson’s Dahl shorts go further than ever in foregrounding his conceptual work, but the results are more than just theoretical; they embody a vision of human relations, of society at large, that is properly understood to be political.

This should be no surprise, given the centrality of Dahl in Anderson’s artistic development. The director’s 2009 adaptation of “ Fantastic Mr. Fox ” is the hinge in his career, the point at which he perceived and heightened the political implications of the stories he was telling, albeit in a way of his own. He expanded Dahl’s brief story of cruelty (the murderous mania of its trio of farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean) to emphasize the Foxes’ family life—not just their emotional conflicts but also the stylish nobility of their resistance. In effect, what nearly everyone loved about Anderson’s 2014 live-action feature, “ The Grand Budapest Hotel ”—expressly a story of a resistance and one in which high style emerges as a crucial tool in resisting Nazi oppressors—was already there in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Anderson’s first great political film. At the same time, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” also brought an aesthetic renewal: in discovering the joy of total control that stop-motion animation afforded, he learned lessons about how wild emotions could be combined with even more precisely calibrated performances, even more copiously ornamental designs, and even more aphoristically literary scripts. Since then, Anderson—with an even keener awareness of directorial power—has endowed his live-action features with ever more reflexive narrative framing devices, which make the telling of stories the subject of his stories.

That’s where the four new Dahl adaptations—“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” (the longest), “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher,” and “Poison”—come in. Though the four films have widely varied subjects, Anderson approaches them all similarly: they are giddy cinematic experiments that take the concept of storytelling daringly literally. In all four films, the stories’ characters recite Dahl’s texts on camera from beginning to end (with certain modifications) while enacting the events that they describe amid dazzlingly elaborate stagecraft that reveals its own artifices and the sort of exquisitely confectionery décor and costumes that are a hallmark of Anderson’s refined art. (Dahl himself comes in as a character, too, played by Ralph Fiennes.) The four stories are, essentially, dramatized audiobooks, something like music videos for literature. The characters deliver their narration into the camera, addressing viewers head on, and then, with deft timing and theatrical precision, turn their heads (or even just shift their eyes) to address one another.

Lest viewers become even briefly comfortable with the enchantments of his staging and of his actors’ performances, Anderson jolts them alert with ever more audacious contrivances. In “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” walls are raised and backdrops lowered into the action as if in a theatre—and the backs of stage flats and the supporting struts of stage floors remain visible. In “The Rat Catcher,” the titular exterminator (Fiennes) pretends to handle invisible animals as if in pantomime. In “Henry Sugar” and “Poison,” stagehands run on to hand props—some of them conspicuously fake—to the characters. In “The Swan,” a makeup artist applies stage blood to a character on camera. Rear-screen projections abound—and Anderson shows the borders of the rear screen, making manifest the trickery involved.

Anderson has long mastered the lesson that Godard delivered from “Breathless” onward: that viewers can remain deeply engaged in the events of a drama even while being pulled outside of that drama by fillips of form or fourth-wall-breaking winks and nods. Here he stands that notion on its head; he never breaks the framework of classically realistic drama because he never establishes it in the first place. It is not a question of characters breaking the action to address the camera but the reverse, and, for this reason, the direct address comes off as natural and central, and the acted-out drama as strange and supplementary. Ever since “Rushmore,” Anderson’s work has been an ongoing reproach to the unquestioned dramatic realism of even most of the great filmmakers of the time, and these four new shorts both heighten the audacious inventiveness of his wondrous artifices and sharpen their powers of critical discernment to a stinging point.

The four short Dahl adaptations are based on stories that, like “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” seethe with cruelty but also more forcefully foreground matters of justice and history. As with Martin Scorsese’s recent films, the Dahl quartet goes beneath the surfaces of society to reveal disturbing truths. Anderson relies on methods of direct, candid, ultimately appalled narration to deliver—as if in his own voice—large-scale tales of empire, extraction, and appropriation, local ones of brutality and hatred and ambient horror. “Henry Sugar” is a story of wide scope. Henry (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a rich fop who becomes obsessed with a magic manual and teaches himself X-ray vision and even clairvoyance; nested within his story is a history of the manual itself—delivered by Dahl (Fiennes), by the doctor (Dev Patel) who wrote the manual, by the magician (Ben Kingsley) whose skills it details, and by Henry himself. This narrative ranges from the late nineteenth century to the nineteen-seventies, it leaps from Calcutta to London to Lausanne, and it’s centered on the British Empire and a special sort of spiritual exploitation, which turns a yogi’s lonely devotions into a white Englishman’s easy and illicit gains.

“Poison” is also set in India—indeed, mainly in a single room there, where a British man (Cumberbatch) cruelly repays an Indian doctor (Kingsley) who saves him from the mortal bite of a poisonous snake. In “The Rat Catcher,” a local reporter (Richard Ayoade) tells the story of an odd, nearly feral exterminator (Fiennes) whose activities reach beyond professional responsibility into perverse pleasure. “The Swan” is the most shocking of the four, a tale of violent, nearly deadly bullying, told retrospectively by the adult (Rupert Friend) who was that bullied child (Asa Jennings); adult and child sometimes, startlingly, appear together, and, at other times, the adult reënacts his ordeals. It’s essentially a survivor’s story, and, despite its bland suburban setting, its iconography of illuminated train tracks and barbed wire and its details of torture make it resemble a remembrance of the Holocaust.

Among the virtues of the age of streaming is a renewed prominence for short films. Recent brief masterworks given streaming releases include Dwayne LeBlanc’s “ Civic ,” Sophia Nahli Allison’s “ A Love Song for Latasha ,” Jay Rosenblatt’s “ When We Were Bullies ,” and Radu Jude’s “ The Potemkinists .” Anderson’s Dahl tetralogy deserves mention alongside them, but it also takes its place among classics of another venerable genre, the one-director, multi-episode feature. These include such supreme masterworks as Roberto Rossellini’s “ Paisan ” (six tales of the Second World War in Italy and of the country’s troubled reconstruction); Max Ophuls’s ironically erotic and romantic Maupassant trilogy, “ Le Plaisir ”; and Michelangelo Antonioni’s “ I Vinti ,” a tripartite drama of disorienting cultural modernity. More recently, there have been Éric Rohmer’s “ Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle ,” Nanni Moretti’s “ Caro Diario ,” Marzieh Meshkini’s “ The Day I Became a Woman ,” and Hong Sangsoo’s “ Oki’s Movie .” Though the Netflix release of Anderson’s four Dahl adaptations is a wondrous bounty, they deserve screenings and a DVD compilation as the unified feature that they implicitly are. ♦

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