Books By Rumer Godden, Jane Asher - Author

Rumer Godden was born in Sussex in 1907 but spent most of her childhood in India. After reluctantly travelling to England for school, she trained as a dancer and returned to India where she ran a dance school and stayed until the end of the Second World War. One of the UK's most distinguished authors, she wrote many well-known and much-loved books for both adults and children, including Black Narcissus (1939), The Greengage Summer (1958) and Coromandel Sea Change (1991). Her novel The Diddakoi won the Whitbread Children's Book Award in 1972. In 1994 she was awarded the OBE. She died in Rye, East Sussex, in 1998.