Berlie Doherty (born 6 November 1943) is an English novelist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. She is best known for children's books, for which she has twice won the Carnegie Medal. She has also written novels for adults, plays for theatre and radio, television series and libretti for children's opera.
Education and early career
Born in Knotty Ash in Liverpool in 1943 to Walter Hollingsworth, Doherty was the youngest of three children. All four grandparents had died before she was born, which she later called "a great deprivation". Aged four, she moved to Hoylake, the setting of several of her early books. She was encouraged to write by her father, from whom she later wrote that she had "inherited stories". A railway clerk by trade, he was also a keen writer whose poetry had been published in the local newspaper. Doherty soon followed suit, with her poetry and stories appearing on the children's pages of the Liverpool Echo and Hoylake News and Advertiser from age five. Her first submitted stories and poems were typed by her father, and he nourished her dream to be a writer, as she recalled in 2004: "I cherished the dream, but it was my father who nourished it. He used to tell me bedtime stories every night, and very often we would make them up together, tossing the ideas backwards and forwards like a bright ball. Then he would drop the ball—'I've had enough now', he would say, '... you can finish that for yourself.'"
Berlie attended Upton Hall Convent School. She read English at the University of Durham (1965), and then studied social science at the University of Liverpool. In 1978, after starting a family, she gained a postgraduate certificate in education at the University of Sheffield. A lesson in creative writing as part of the certificate led to a short story about the convent school; broadcast on local radio, it was to form the nucleus of Doherty's first adult novel, Requiem.
After employment as a social worker and teacher, Doherty spent two years writing and producing schools programmes for BBC Radio Sheffield. Several of the series generated later publications: How Green You Are: The Making of Fingers Finnigan; Children of Winter; Tilly Minst Tales: Granny was a Buffer Girl and White Peak Farm...
Career as a writer
Doherty wrote for the newspaper children's pages from age five until she lost eligibility when she turned fourteen. She returned seriously to writing when her children had entered school, more than twenty years later. Her first book was How Green You Are!, a novel published in 1982 by Methuen in its Pied Piper series, with illustrations by Elaine McGregor Turney. Next year she became a full-time writer.
White Peak Farm (1984) was Doherty's third book and her first for older readers, featuring life on a contemporary family farm and its recent changes. One reviewer called it autobiographical but her only farm experience had been work for one of the Sheffield schools radio series, when she had interviewed farm teenagers in Derbyshire, where she set the novel. (Later she moved into a 300-year-old farm cottage in the Derbyshire Peak District, in the midst of farming but not as a farmer.)
She has written over sixty novels and picture books for children and young adults. According to Philip Pullman, "Doherty's strength has always been her emotional honesty." Her books encompass multiple genres. Some draw on her experience as a social worker to dramatise contemporary issues, including teenage pregnancy in Dear Nobody (1991), adoption in The Snake-Stone (1995), and African AIDS orphans and child trafficking in her latest novel, Abela: The Girl Who Saw Lions (2007). A conservationist, her story book Tilly Mint and the Dodo (1988) centres on the threat of species extinction. Spellhorn (1989) uses a fantasy setting to explore the experience of blindness. Several of her works have historical settings, such as Street Child (1993), which is set in 1860s London and Treason, set in Henry VIII's reign. Some of them are based on Doherty's own family history; Granny Was a Buffer Girl (1986) includes the story of her parents' marriage, while The Sailing Ship Tree (1998) draws on the lives of her father and grandfather. She had been deprived of living grandparents as living links to her own "distant past"; she "re-created" both her mother's parents in Granny and re-created her father's father in Sailing-Ship.