Category: Sam Youd

Who was John Christopher?

Sam Youd was born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.

As a boy, he was devoted to the newly emergent genre of science-fiction: ‘In the early thirties,’ he later wrote, ‘we knew just enough about the solar system for its possibilities to be a magnet to the imagination.’

Over the following decades, his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels, cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers, light comedies …

Cry freedom!

It is getting on for fifty years since Sam Youd decided to try his hand at ‘young fiction’. In 1966, as he himself recalls: [My agent] David Higham came to me with a proposition. Richard...