Peter Rushforth

Who was Peter Rushforth?

Peter Scott Rushforth was an English teacher and novelist. He published only two novels in his lifetime; although they were separated by a quarter of a century, both were released to considerable critical acclaim. He died while on his weekly ramble with his friends, from his home in the village of Castleton on the North Yorkshire Moors.

Rushforth was born in Gateshead in County Durham, but was raised in Leeds. He studied English at Hull University. After completing a teacher's training course at Nottingham, he became a full-time school teacher. He taught English for four years in Huddersfield, before joining Friends' School in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire. In due course, he would become Head of English at this school.

His first novel Kindergarten was published in 1979. Kindled by Rushforth's interest in the Holocaust, and in particular his discovery of a cache of pre-war letters from Jewish parents pleading for their children's safe passage, Kindergarten was a short and disturbing novel, a grim reworking of the fable of Hansel and Gretel from the canon of the Brothers Grimm. The book was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic. It received rave reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, while in Britain, it won the Hawthornden Prize, the oldest literary award in the UK. The Hawthornden, awarded annually for the "best work of imaginative literature", was particularly appropriate for the non-Jewish Rushforth who had written persuasively about the Holocaust.