Books and Baking

Posted on 25 February 2019

Congratulations to York English alumna Elly McCausland, who has just published her first scholarly monograph, and whose forthcoming debut cookbook has already been shortlisted for a prestigious prize.

Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862-1980, newly published by Boydell and Brewer, traces how Malory’s famous medieval text was reworked to capture the imagination of children and young readers between 1862 and 1980. Covering texts by J.T. Knowles, Sidney Lanier, Howard Pyle, T.H. White, Roger Lancelyn Green, Alice Hadfield, John Steinbeck and Susan Cooper, among others, Elly’s book explores how books for children frequently become books about children, reflecting changing ideas about the nature of childhood, and the status of the juvenile reader.

Elly is also a well-established food blogger, and her forthcoming cookbook, The Botanical Kitchen explores our love affair with every part of the plant – fruits, flowers, leaves and seeds, from orchards to the tropics, tea leaves to tayberries – and shows how they enhance flavour, dramatically shifting and developing the character of a dish.

To learn more about Elly’s food writing, and how she juggles the demands of being an academic and running a popular food blog, read her thoughts on being a food writer at After English.

Elly is currently Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Oslo in Norway, having completed a postdoc at Aarhus in Denmark.