Roald Dahl

Born to Norwegian parents in Llandaff (now part of Cardiff in Wales) on 13 September 1916, Roald Dahl was named after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and spoke Norwegian as his first language when he as at home. While growing up without a father who died of pneumonia when Roald was only 3, Roald and his siblings (including his older step siblings who were half Norwegian- half French) would spend their holidays in Wales and their ancestral home of Norway.

It was his Norwegian ancestors who provided him with the folk tales he was told at bedtime that inspired him to write The Witches (published in 1982) where grotesque witches disguised themselves as beautiful ladies that kidnapped children and transformed them into anything like a new addition to a painting or a mouse. During his primary school years, Roald placed a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers to torment and frighten the old shopkeeper and in Repton (a posh secondary school), he got to test taste and rate Cadbury chocolate bars. The Chocolate testing days in Repton was Roald's inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (published in 1964) and its sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (published in 1972) which sees an impoverished boy named Charlie win a golden ticket to the chocolate factory of the eccentric and former recluse Willy Wonka. Roald worked for Shell Oil and during World War 2, he joined the Royal Air Force but following a crash that inspired his first book the Gremlins (which nearly became a Disney film before being cancelled and the unused Gremlin characters appearing in the Epic Mickey games nearly 70 years later).

Roald married actress Patricia Neal and they had 5 children although one daughter Olivia succumbed to measles in the 1960s. It was around the same time that his daughter died that Roald and engineer Stanley Wade came up with a valve to drain fluids from the brain of Roald's son Theo whose pram was knocked against a bus by a taxi, causing skull fractures. Patricia Neal also suffered a stroke and although she recovered, Roald made light of her temporal new way of speaking to create the language of the BFG (published in 1982), a 24 foot high gentle giant who blows dreams into the bedrooms of sleeping children at night. Roald lived his days at a 19th century farmhouse called Gipsy House (its name is a product of its time) where a Romani caravan served some inspiration for Danny Champion of the World (published in 1975) in Great Missenden and he wrote his stories in a small gardening hut at the bottom of his garden with a special type of pencil he once had to have ordered by his American publisher when one of the 6 or 7 brands couldn't be found in England on yellow paper. Roald didn't just write children's stories, he also wrote adult stories (which were adapted into a TV series called Tales of the Unexpected) that had the touch of karma and suspense his children books had and he also wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) where he introduced the character of the Child Catcher. Roald had many illustrators but perhaps the one most connected to his work is Quentin Blake who later illustrated all of his work that he didn't illustrate previously in 1995 onwards.

In later life, Roald had many injuries like a horrible nosebleed and a slipped disc. He had to have his hip replaced with an artificial one and a lot of the operations eventually saw him lose 7 centimetres from his 6 foot 6 stature which played inspiration for his 1982 book The Twits which involved an unattractive couple playing nasty tricks on each other and the birds who land on the glue coated tree. Roald divorced Patricia Neal in 1983 and he later married Felicity Crossland who handles his estate to this day. Roald Dahl died of leukaemia (cancer of the white blood cells) on 23rd November 1990 at the age of 74, not long after the first adaption of his work the Witches came out which he hated (he wasn't pleased with some of the adaptions of his work except for the 1989 film adaption of The BFG) and he advised at one showing to skip the film and read its source material instead. Fitting for his Norwegian heritage, Roald was given a Viking funeral of some sorts which saw his coffin being filled with a power saw, snooker cues, burgundy chocolates and some H-B pencils. Roald Dahl is buried in Great Missenden's Church of St Peter and Paul but his work lives on though films and musicals. In 2021, streaming service Netflix bought his works with the intention to adapt them into films and streaming shows. His daughter Tessa also wrote a book while one of Roald's grandchildren is model Sophie Dahl.