For Book Week celebrations in 1995, I went as a librarian. Not just any librarian, but the librarian, from The Great Piratical Rumbustification & The Librarian and the Robbers. Seventeen years after it was published, I was not just celebrating Margaret Mahy’s work, I was living it.
Ten years later and it’s 2005. I am an adult, living in a city townhouse with a tiny courtyard of grass – too small for a lawn mower, too big for secateurs. Every time I mow using a grass knife, I imagine myself as Dido in The Catalogue of the Universe.
Margaret Mahy was one of those authors who becomes inextricably entwined with your life. She leaves behind a tremendous legacy, and she will be greatly missed, as is testament by such posts as Allen & Unwin’s and Judith Ridge’s.
For more information on her life and work:
