Nancy Willard

American author of award-winning books and poetry works

Nancywillard,aprolific author whose 70 books of poems and fiction enchanted children and adults alike with a lyrical blend of fanciful illusion and stark reality, died 19 February at her home in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was 80.

The cause was coronary and pulmonary arrest, her husband, photographer Eric Lindbloom, said. Willard’s 1982 picture book, A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, was the first volume of poetry to receive the Newbery Medal, the country’s highest honour for children’s writing. Illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, it also received a Caldecott Honour as one of the best illustrated books of the year.

Willard traced her weaving of fancy and realism to her upbringing. Her father was a chemistry professor who perfected a method of rustproofing; her mother, she said, was a romantic who read to her daughters during summer boating idylls.

“I grew up aware of two ways of looking at the world that are opposed to each other and yet can exist side by side in the same person,” Willard wrote in an essay in Writer magazine. “One is the scientific view. The other is the magic view.”

“Nancy Willard’s imagination — in verse or prose, for children or adults — builds castles stranger than any mad King of Bavaria ever built,” poet Donald Hall wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1981. Nancy Margaret Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 26 June, 1936, the daughter of Hobart Willard, who taught at the University of Michigan, and the former Margaret Sheppard. She published her first poem when she was 7, she said. ©New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service