Garner was born in 1934 in Cheshire into a working-class family with a strong storytelling tradition. He grew up in Alderley Edge, a Cheshire village at the base of a steep escarpment

His childhood was also punctuated by periods of illness and instances of near-death from diphtheria, meningitis and pneumonia

With his latest novel, Treacle Walker, Alan Garner has become the oldest writer to be nominated for The Booker Prize,

This year Alan Garner became the oldest author ever to be shortlisted for The Booker Prize for his small but mighty novel Treacle Walker

Treacle Walker, a dreamlike fable of a convalescent boy named Joseph, a rag-and-bone man and a bog-dwelling spirit is at once a characteristically cryptic tale of a child threatened by dark forces

Fusing myth and modernity in tales of magic and the power of nature, Garner's stories are more unwieldy and harder to categories than others within British literature

Garner was inspired by Victorian dinner plates owned by his mother-in-law which featured a floral design that, looked at the right way, could also be interpreted as a ring of owls' heads

The novel captured the imagination of author Edward Parnell, whose autobiographical journey around places associated with British folklore, Ghostland