Roald Dahl

1. Roald Dahl By Alex Lightman

2. HE’S BORN! Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales on September 13th 1916. Nobody yet knew he would be an author, write 55 books and be extremely famous.

3. Family Roald Dahl’s father, Harald, and older sister, Astri, died when Roald Dahl was only 3 years old. That left his mother responsible for 4 children and 2 stepchildren. One adult and 6 children! Could you imagine that!

4. FAMOUS BOOKS BY ROALD DAHL • The BFG • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory • The Witches • Matilda • The Twits • James and the Giant Peach • Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator

5. DAHL BEGINS TO WRITE In 1942 C. S. Forester, author of Captain Hornblower, took Dahl to lunch. Forester was in America to publish the British war effort. He hoped Roald would describe his version of war and put it in the Saturday Evening Post.

6. WHERE HE WROTE In 1960 Roald and his family settled in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, in England at Gipsy House. At the bottom of the garden there was a hut. Roald Dahl used the hut towrite. The reason he liked it so much was because it was a little area where nobody disturbed him or made too much noise.

7. MOTHER TURNS INTO GRANDMOTHER Roald Dahl, wrote a very famous book, The Witches. The Grandmother was based off of his mother. He knew his mother as a “rock” because she was always on his side, no matter what he did. That’s just like what the grandmother is like in The Witches, always on your side, or, as Dahl thinks of it as, a “real rock.”

8. Work At the age of 18, Dahl joined the Public Schools Exploring Society’s expedition to Newfoundland. Then he started working for Shell as a salesman in Dar es Salaam. Dahl was 23 when the war broke out and he signed up for the Royal Air Force in Nairobi.

9. Got Ideas? In this slide, I’m going to tell you how Roald Dahl got his ideas to write books. “It starts always with a tiny little seed of an idea, a little germ, and that even doesn’t come very easily. You can be mooching around for a year or so before you get a good one. When I do get a good one, mind you, I quickly write it down so I don’t forget it because it disappears otherwise rather like a dream. But when I get it, I don’t dash up here and start to write it. I’m very careful. I walk around it and look at it and sniff it and then see if I think it will go. Because once you start, you’re embarked on a year’s work and so it’s a big decision.”

10. How Dahl Made His Interesting Characters In this slide, I’m going to tell you how Roald Dahl made his characters interesting “When your writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them and this is even more true in children’s books. I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly,you make them extremely ugly. That I think is a fun and makes impact.”

11. The End In 1990 Dahl was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder, Myelo-dysplastic anaemia. He died on November 23, 1990.