In 2008, the prestigious Costa Book Awards voted Enid Blyton the world's best-loved author, ahead of J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. In her long career, Blyton sold more than 600 million books. Her stories were translated into more than 90 languages, and from 2000 to 2010, eight million Enid Blyton books were sold in Britain alone. That's good going for an author who has been dead for 43 years. Blyton was a one-woman writing factory.
So what sort of books did Blyton write? She wrote books for children and teenagers, all with young characters at the centre of the story. Blyton was, and still is, unique in the world of youth fiction.
A brief Blyton bio
Enid Blyton was born in the London suburb of East Dulwich in 1897. On leaving school, she trained to be a teacher, and after qualifying, she worked for five years in schools in and around London. In her spare time, Blyton loved to write and her first book of poems for children was published in 1922. Two years later, Blyton married Hugh Pollock, an editor for the London publishing firm of George Newnes. Blyton began writing short stories and novels for children, and her husband's connections helped get her work published.
They had two daughters and, in a book published after Blyton's death, Imogen, the younger daughter, painted an unpleasant portrait of her mother. She wrote that her mother ignored her own daughters and was a bad parent.
Blyton was loved by thousands of young readers in Britain in the 1950s, and after her death in 1968, her fame continued to spread worldwide, with television adaptations and translations of her books.