Leila Berg

She was brought up in Salford, Lancashire, in a Jewish doctor's family; she wrote vividly about this part of her life in Flickerbook (1997), describing also later meetings in Cambridge through her older brother, particularly with Margot Heinemann, and J. B. S. Haldane whom she would reference obliquely in the early Chunky books. She associated with Young Communist League members at the time of the Spanish Civil War (in which she lost two lovers) and eventually joined the movement. Her first job as a journalist was with the British communist daily paper The Daily Worker.[3]

Berg was influenced in her thinking by psychologist Susan Isaacs.[4] After working as a journalist in World War II, during which she married and started a family, she began to write children's fiction. She also took an interest in the progressive education advocated by A. S. Neill (Summerhill), Michael Duane (Risinghill) and John Holt ("unschooling").[5]

Berg began writing in a more realistic and gritty style, for younger children, in the 1960s, in the Nippers series of readers. This was an influential move designed to bring children's books closer to ordinary, real, urban life, and away from the Janet and John reader style, and probably the cosiness of Enid Blyton's world, a ubiquitous influence in that period.[6]

She became the children's editor for the publisher Methuen.[7] As she put it in a speech at the University of Essex, at an honorary degree ceremony: "All my life I have sought to empower children."[8]

She was awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Award in 1974.[9]

Leila Berg died on 17 April 2012.[10]

• Biography
• Risinghill School website