Alison Prince was an award-winning British children's writer, screenwriter and biographer, who settled on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. Her novels for young people won several awards, and she is known for being the scriptwriter of the much repeated children's television seriesTrumpton.
Background
Prince was born on 26 March 1931 in Beckenham, Kent to Louise and Charles Prince. Her mother trained as a nurse and was later Mayor of Bromley while her father was manager of the Yorkshire Bank in London. She grew up in South London and attended a girls' grammar school where she enjoyed grammar and Latin, but not maths. Her parents were from Scotland and Yorkshire. Her father was a keen pianist, and she played the clarinet. As a child she visited Scottish relatives in Glasgow. After completing a degree course at the Slade School of Art, where she had won a scholarship, Prince found work in casual, low-paid jobs unrelated to art. She later took a postgraduate teaching diploma at Goldsmith's College, then taught art at the Elliott Comprehensive School, in Putney. She married a fellow teacher, Goronwy Parry, and together they had three children. With this interruption to her teaching career, she turned instead to occasional journalism. After the marriage ended, she ran a small farm in Suffolk for eight years.
From television to books
Prince later moved into writing for children's television, gaining notice with her scripts for the stop motion animated puppet series Trumpton for young children produced by Gordon Murray. Prince also wrote the lyrics for the songs performed by Brian Cant. "I didn’t have a television, but I had three kids to feed, so I said yes," she recalled in 2006. Her first book was Joe and a Horse and other stories about Joe from 'Watch with Mother, with Joan Hickson, a 1968 spin-off from the BBC pre-school program Watch with Mother. In the late 1970s, she turned to writing books for children, some based on historical characters. They include My Royal Story about Catherine of Aragon, which was re-released in 2010. How's Business, set in World War II, made the shortlist for the Nestle Smarties Book Prize. The Sherwood Hero is a modern-day Robin Hood story for young adults, about a girl stealing a credit card from her father's client, drawing £100, attempting to hand it out to the poor in the streets of Glasgow, and then coping with the guilt. For this Prince was a joint winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers. Her thriller Oranges and Murder was the Scottish Arts Council Children's Book of the Year in 2002. Translations of her books have been published in several languages, including Danish, German, Japanese and Welsh. Mainly for adults, Prince wrote well-received biographies of Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen, a collection of essays on formative thinking, two booklets of poetry, and two volumes of pieces that had originally appeared in a local Arran newspaper. In 2005, Prince received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Leicester for services to children's books. Forbidden Soldier, a children's book about the second phase of the English Civil War, appeared in 2014, as did The Lost King: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, a biography of Richard III.
Death
Alison Prince died on 12 October 2019, aged 88, having been ill for a number of years, which involved undergoing major heart surgery.
Selected works
These titles are or have recently been available in the UK, according to the websites of major internet booksellers:
