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Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age on nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as described in his book As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter. Laurie Lee died in May 1997. In its obituary the Guardian wrote, 'He has a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precisions'.
With his rich prose forever one of the most original contributions to 20th century English literature, Laurie Lee remains, however, best known for another rose: the village girl who 'baptized (him) with her cidrous kisses' in the slumbrous shade of a summer haystack. Cider With Rosie, his enchanting autobiographical account of growing up in a delightfully haphazard Gloucestershire family, has entranced generations of adults and children alike. Yet Lee's sensuous apprehension of the world about him extended equally to his travel writings, producing vivid portraits pulsating with his hallmark evocative imagery. It was on the eve of the Spanish Civil War that Lee first travelled to the Iberian Peninsula, later returning in its wake to re-discover a country damaged yet undaunted. Andalusia in particular, the subject of this short but intensely observed book, is possessed of an indomitable and original spirit forged by the marriage of a Moorish heritage with European Catholicism. As Lee sallies forth from the trim English streets of Gibraltar, guitar on his shoulder, no detail of the primitive Mediterranean scene escapes his eye. The people he meets, the fishermen, the beggars, the dark-veiled old women and the ever-present smugglers on whom the starved economy of southern Spain seemed at that time to subsist, are drawn with the inimitable perception of a writer for whom exploration of the intrinsic vibrance of language was fundamental to his vision. Laurie Lee died in 1997. In recent years his mellifluous style has experienced something of a fall in favour. Many deem it unfashionable today, which seems a pity. Because from the sun-baked plains of Seville to the Sierras and the magical city of Granada - 'like a rose preserved in snow' - here is delivered the tale of a landscape as eternally and seductively intoxicating as the luscious white wine the author then drank at - oh wonder! - just six old pennies a bottle. (Kirkus UK)
