The Lewis Legacy-Issue 77, Summer 1998 News and Views

Katherine Paterson, C. S. Lewis lover and author of Newbery Medal Award winner Bridge to Terebithia (a realistic novel about children inspired by Narnia), has won the 1998 Hans Christian Andersen Award, which is often referred to as the little Nobel prize. (It was established in 1956 by the International Board on Books for Young People and is awarded every two years to a living author whose complete work has made an important international contribution.)

For the Lewis centenary Microsoft sponsored a contest. UK schools sent in 3,000 children’s designs for Narnia Christmas cards to be sold to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). Young artists won cash prizes, and schools won computers. Winning designs were displayed at London Toy and Model Museum’s World of Narnia Exhibition.

In June the Ulster History Circle and the Lewis Centenary Group unveiled a blue memorial plaque at the Dundella site where C. S. Lewis was born.

Annual Southern California C. S. Lewis Society workshop at Valyermo, CA, 10-14 August: Lewis’s poetic legacy, featuring Don King. Contact Edie Dougherty at edie@loop.com. (James Prothero has withdrawn his resignation as editor of the Society’s journal, The Lamp-Post,)

1998 Annual Wheaton College Writing and Literature Conference, 23-26 September, will focus on C. S. Lewis. Bruce Edwards, Doris Myers, George Mussachio, Tom Key. Call Wayne Martindale (630/752-5787).

On 4-5 December 1998 a Great Books Seminar on love will be held in Ojai, CA. The three texts at this seminar will be Plato’s Symposium, C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves, and Shakespeare’s Othello. For information call 805-646-0166.

STOP AND SHOP

The Wisdom of C. S. Lewis by Brian Sibley is an unusually small and pretty gift book published in the UK in 1997 by Lion Giftlines (3.99). Sibley’s introduction is excellent. But one wonders why he cited Poems as his source for Lewis’s poem “God in His mercy made…” instead of its original source, Pilgrim’s Regress, and why a quotation from Perelandra is attributed to Voyage to Venus. And it is too bad that Sibley included the Waltered version of “Prayer” from Poems instead of the superior version Lewis published in Letters to Malcolm.

Richard Lancelyn Green is a son of Roger Lancelyn Green (Lewis friend and biographer) and his wife June (a well-known English actress). His parents accompanied C. S. Lewis and Joy to Greece in 1960. Richard reads dozens of great books on “Books on Tape,” For a catalog call 1-800-88-BOOKS.

The single most exciting revelation in Dante’s Divine Comedy: Purgatory is the revolutionary discovery that Botticelli’s “Primavera,” one of the world’s most famous and beloved paintings, has been misinterpreted by art historians and overlooked by Dante experts for almost 500 years. Botticelli, a Divine Comedy enthusiast, created “Primavera” as a Neoplatonist illustration of Cantos 28-30 of Purgatory. (The painting is featured in full color on the cover and explained in the Introduction.)