Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British writer known for his children's books, short stories, poetry, and screenplays, and he also served as a fighter ace during wartime. Over 300 million copies of his books have been sold globally. He is often described as one of the finest storytellers for children of the 20th century. Born in Wales to well-off Norwegian immigrants, Dahl spent most of his life in England. During the Second World War, he flew for the Royal Air Force, first as a fighter pilot and later as an intelligence officer, ultimately reaching the rank of acting wing commander.

Dahl came into the public eye as a writer in the 1940s, producing work for both children and adults, and went on to become one of the best-selling authors in the world. His literary honors include the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the British Book Awards' Children's Author of the Year in 1990. In 2008, *The Times* ranked him 16th on its list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945." Forbes named him the top-earning dead celebrity in 2021.

His short stories are famous for their surprise endings, while his children's books are noted for their unsentimental, macabre, and often darkly comic tone, featuring adult villains who oppose child protagonists. These stories also champion kind-hearted characters and carry a warm underlying sentiment. His notable children's works include *James and the Giant Peach*, *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*, *Matilda*, *The Witches*, *Fantastic Mr Fox*, *The BFG*, *The Twits*, *George's Marvellous Medicine*, and *Danny, the Champion of the World*. For older readers, he wrote the short story collections *Tales of the Unexpected* and *The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More*.

Dahl was born in 1916 at Villa Marie in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian parents Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl. His father, a wealthy shipbroker who had built his own fortune, emigrated from Sarpsborg, Norway, to Britain in the 1880s with his first wife, Frenchwoman Marie Beaurin-Gresser. They had two children, Ellen Marguerite and Louis, before her death in 1907. Roald's mother, originally from Christiania (now Oslo), came from a prominent Norwegian family of lawyers, merchants, landowners, and Church of Norway clergy, and moved to Britain when she married his father in 1911. Dahl was named after the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. His first language was Norwegian, spoken at home with his parents and sisters Astri, Alfhild, and Else. The children were raised in the Lutheran Church of Norway and baptized at the Norwegian Church in Cardiff. His maternal grandmother, Ellen Wallace, was a granddaughter of parliament member Georg Wallace and a descendant of an early 18th-century Scottish immigrant to Norway.

When Dahl was three, his seven-year-old sister Astri died of appendicitis in 1920; his father died of pneumonia at age 57 a few weeks later. Later that year, his youngest sister, Asta, was born. Harald Dahl left an estate valued at £158,917 10s 0d (equivalent to about £6,141,145 in 2025). His mother chose to stay in Wales rather than return to Norway, as her husband had wanted their children educated in English schools, which he considered the best in the world. At age six, Dahl met his idol Beatrix Potter, author of *The Tale of Peter Rabbit*, at her home, Hill Top, in the Lake District. This meeting was dramatized in the 2020 TV film *Roald & Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse*.

Dahl first attended The Cathedral School in Llandaff. At eight, he and four friends were caned by the headmaster after placing a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers at a local sweet shop owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman named Mrs. Pratchett. The boys called their prank the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924." Mrs. Pratchett later inspired the cruel headmistress Miss Trunchbull in *Matilda*; a similar prank involving a water jug also appears in the book. Gobstoppers were a popular sweet among British schoolboys between the wars, and Dahl featured them in his fictional Everlasting Gobstopper in *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*.

Dahl then transferred to St Peter's boarding school in Weston-super-Mare. His parents wanted him at an English public school, and St Peter's was the nearest due to a regular ferry across the Bristol Channel. His time there was unpleasant; he was very homesick and wrote to his mother weekly but never told her how unhappy he was. After her death in 1967, he discovered she had saved every letter. They were broadcast in abridged form as BBC Radio 4's *Book of the Week* in 2016 for his centenary. Dahl wrote about this period in his autobiography *Boy: Tales of Childhood*. He excelled at conkers, a traditional British and Irish children's game using horse chestnut seeds, recalling that "at the ages of eight, nine and ten, conkers brought sunshine to our lives during the dreary autumn term."

From age 13 in 1929, Dahl attended Repton School in Derbyshire. He disliked the hazing and described a setting of ritual cruelty and status hierarchy, where younger boys served as personal servants for older ones and faced terrible beatings. His biographer Donald Sturrock noted these violent experiences in Dahl's early life. Dahl's writings reflect some of these darker experiences and are marked by his hatred of cruelty and corporal punishment. His autobiography *Boy: Tales of Childhood* covers this period.