Born: April 8, 1932
Died: July 12, 2022
Joan Lingard, the award-winning Scottish born writer who grew up in Northern Ireland, has died aged 90. Lingard was the author of more than 60 books for adults and children including the groundbreaking Kevin and Sadie series of young adult novels about teenagers who find love across the religious divide during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Northern Irish writer Jan Carson said that the Kevin and Sadie books were an absolute staple of school. “They were my very first experience of encountering characters who sounded like me and came from the same part of the world as me. Lingard played an enormously instrumental role in reminding so many of us Northern Ireland creatives that our stories were valid, interesting and worth exploring,” said Carson.
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The Twelfth Day of July (1970) and Across the Barricades (1972), whose German translation won the prestigious German Buxtehuder Bulle literary award for youth fiction in 1986, were the titles of the first and second books in that bestselling series of five novels. The entire series, which has sold over one million copies, was reissued in 2016 under Penguin’s The Originals imprint.
Lingard was an influential figure in the contemporary Scottish literature scene, having served as an active member of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish PEN. She was an instrumental member of the committee that fought to get the Edinburgh international book festival established. In 1998, her book, Tom and the Tree House won the Scottish Arts Council Children’s Book Award. That same year, she received an MBE for her services to children’s literature.
Lingard was born in the back of a taxi on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, the daughter of Elizabeth (nee Beattie) and Henry Lingard. Her father was an accounts checker and chief yeoman of signals in the Royal Navy.
She moved to live in East Belfast with her family when she was two. A keen reader from a young age, she quickly exhausted most of the books in her local library and requested books as presents for birthdays and at Christmas. Her mother encouraged her to write her own books and at the age of 11, she did just that and realised then that she wanted to be a novelist.
She won a scholarship to Bloomfield Collegiate School, the local girls’ grammar school where she made lifelong friends. Her novel, The File on Fraulien Berg, was based on her experiences at Bloomfield and the school acknowledged her presence there by naming its library after her.
She left school at 16 following the death of her mother from breast cancer and got a job working in a primary school before returning to Edinburgh to join her father. In 1950, she enrolled at Moray House (now part of the University of Edinburgh) to train to be a teacher, graduating in 1953. She taught in primary schools in and around Edinburgh for the next 10 years while also writing whenever she could while her three daughters, who she had with her first husband, Frederick England, played in the garden.
‘Who’s the bad man?’
Lingard’s first novel, Liam’s Daughter, was published in 1963. She wrote five more adult novels before turning her attention to fiction for children. In these books, she focused on the prejudices children in Northern Ireland grew up with – and how they didn’t have to carry these prejudices into their adult lives.
In an interview in the Irish Post in 1998, Lingard explained how she came up with the idea for the Kevin and Sadie series when a friend from Belfast came to visit her in her home in Edinburgh. “She was only recently married to an Orangeman. We argued but in spite of that, I liked him, which made you think more about it – and he got on well with my kids, who were all under five. He would tell them bedtime stories and I could hear them laughing. One night by the bedroom door, I heard them and he was saying ‘Who’s the good man? And they said, “King Billy”… And [he said] “who’s the bad man?” And they yelled “the Pope”. And he laughed because they had it all off pat and I laughed because they didn’t know what they were talking about. ‘And he said, “Now, now, it’s only a joke’ And I thought it could have been his own kids. It could have been the start of brainwashing.” It was at that point I thought, I’m going to write a book for young people. And the Twelfth of July was born”.
Following the success of the Kevin and Sadie series, Lingard wrote four books set in Glasgow and the Highlands, again using social divisions as a background to teenagers’ lives. The four books – The Clearance (1974), The Resettling (1975), The Pilgrimage (1976) and The Reunion (1977) were adapted by Lingard in the early 1980s for a two-series BBC television drama, Maggie, starring Scottish actress Kirsty Miller.
Her novels Tug of War (1989) and Between Two Worlds (1995) were inspired by her second husband’s family having to flee Latvia during the second World War. Her novel, The Guilty Party (1987) drew on one of her daughter’s involvement in the protests at Greenham Common. And her last novel for children, Trouble on Cable Street, set in London in 1936, was published in 2014 when she was 82.
Open-minded and spirited, Lingard was wise, funny and direct and a wonderful companion to many.
Joan Amelia Lingard is survived by her second husband, Martin Birkhans, her three daughters, Kersten, Bridget and Jenny, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.