Clive Staples Lewis was born on the outskirts of Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1898. He went to Wynyard School in Hertfordshire, England, and then Campbell College, Northern Ireland. From 1913 to 1917 he was tutored at home.
C S Lewis loved tales of fantastic adventure, such as Gulliver’s Travels , and at age 12 became fascinated by the Norse myths—a passion that he shared with one of his contemporaries, J R R Tolkien.
In 1917, Lewis went to Oxford University where he began his outstanding career as an academic and writer. He gained a triple first at Oxford and was a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College from 1925 to 1954.
During this time he became friendly with Tolkien, another member of the ‘Inklings’, the informal literary group that was a forum for their work.
In 1954 he became Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.
C S Lewis is most famous for the Narnia series of novels for children. Written between 1949 and 1956, the series is a glorious hotch-potch of adventure with a predominant theme of good triumphing over evil. He once said of his writing, ‘I have never actually “made” a story ...
I see pictures. Some of these pictures have a common flavour ... Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up ... I have no idea whether this is the usual way of writing stories ... It is the only one I know: images always come first’. He died on 22 November 1963.
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