Background
She was born as a fraternal twin in Westerham, Kent, on 14 June 1939.
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Penelope Farmer
Edit ProfileEducation
Street Anne"s College.
Career
She was the third child of Hugh Robert MacDonald (died May 26, 2004) and Penelope Boothby Farmer. Her parents and the medical staff at the hospital were not aware of her presence until some 25 minutes after the birth of her older twin sister, Judith. Throughout Farmer"s life, being a twin has been a defining element of her understanding of her identity.
The twins have an older brother, Tim, and a younger sister, Sally.
After attending a boarding school, she read history at Street Anne"s College, Oxford and did postgraduate work at Bedford College, University of London. Penelope Farmer was known in 2012 to be living on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.
Even you young are children of the twentieth century to some extent, could, may have had lost grandparents at least. My ninety-odd year old father, child of almost all of it, weeps still for brothers killed in the first war, friends in the second, tears rolling down his cheeks.
Farmer"s first publication was The China People, a collection of literary fairy tales for young people, in 1960.
One story written for this collection was judged too long to include. This was re-written as the first chapter of her first novel for children, The Summer Birds. In 1963, this received a Carnegie Medal commendation and was cited as an American Library Association Notable Book.
The Summer Birds was soon followed by its sequels, Emma in Winter (1966) and Charlotte Sometimes (1969), and by A Castle of Bone (1972), Year King (1977), Thicker than Water (1989), Penelope: A Novel (1993), and Granny and Maine (1998).
Farmer stated that she, while writing Emma in Winter, did not realize that identity was such a predominant theme in the novel until she encountered Margery Fisher"s comments on the book She had a similar realization, this time on her own, while writing Charlotte Sometimes.
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Born
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Nationality
United Kingdom