British author Kathleen Peyton, a prolific writer for children under the pseudonym K.M. Peyton, died December 19. She was 94. Peyton was best known for the highly regarded and popular Flambards series, which was adapted for television in 1978, the Guardian reported.
In writing Flambards (1967), The Edge of the Cloud (1969), Flambards in Summer (1969) and Flambards Divided (1981), Peyton "drew on the farming countryside around her home in Essex and her love of horses and particularly of hunting. Set at the beginning of the first world war, in the farmhouse where a once-wealthy family live a fractured and angry life, the Flambards series captured the profound social changes brought by the war," the Guardian noted.
The Flambards series made her reputation as a significant writer for teenagers, even though she had originally intended the books to be for adults. Despite criticism from mothers of teenage girls who were outraged by their sexual undertones, the books were an international success. She won the 1969 Carnegie medal for Flambards and the 1970 Guardian Children's Book award for The Edge of the Cloud.
Peyton "showed the same confidence in writing about teenagers in a contemporary, school-set series about the complicated life of Pennington, a gifted but troubled young pianist," the Guardian wrote. Pennington's Seventeenth Summer (1970), The Beethoven Medal (1970) and Pennington's Heir (1973) "were fueled by the same delightful naive romanticism of Flambards."
She wrote her first book, Sabre, the Horse from the Sea (1948), when she was 15, and it was published while she was still a teenager. Many of her works were about horses and riding, including Who, Sir? Me, Sir? (1983), but her 70 books also included thrillers like Prove Yourself a Hero (1977) and Midsummer Night's Death (1978), as well as stories about conservation and ghosts. She spent 20 years researching Dear Fred (1981), based on the life of the jockey Fred Archer. Peyton was appointed MBE in 2014.