{"id":406,"date":"2011-12-15T05:09:39","date_gmt":"2011-12-15T05:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/?p=406"},"modified":"2011-12-15T05:09:39","modified_gmt":"2011-12-15T05:09:39","slug":"one-of-my-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/?p=406","title":{"rendered":"One of my heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw the first reports on Twitter last night as I was finishing up the day&#8217;s writing: <strong>Russell Hoban<\/strong> has died.<\/p>\n<p>There have already been some fine things written about him. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2011\/dec\/14\/russell-hoban-dies-86?newsfeed=true\">an obit in UK paper The Guardian<\/a>. This one <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/BIGPictureBooks\/status\/146939347722186753\/photo\/1\">from his editor David Lloyd<\/a>, is my favourite.<\/p>\n<p>Though his creativity remained as strong as ever, Mr Hoban had been physically very frail for some time. I knew, via The Kraken, a mailing list of fans, that he was in hospital again: that&#8217;s partly why <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/?p=395\">I posted <strong>Door<\/strong> below<\/a>, as a way of wishing him well. Today I&#8217;m very sad.<\/p>\n<p>As well as his warm and wonderful books, he leaves us his example. In a world which often seems like it only cares about the bottom line he pursued his own creative path where it led him, producing <strong>beautiful, original, astonishing writing<\/strong> on the way.<\/p>\n<p>In recent interviews he said he&#8217;d begun to think of death as &#8216;a good career move&#8217; &#8211; and maybe the flurry of tributes from readers all over the world who&#8217;ve been touched by his work will inspire more to discover it. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.designweek.co.uk\/home\/blog\/soonchild-a-magical-arctic-world\/3032587.article\"><strong>Soonchild<\/strong>, coming in March, looks like it will be another Hoban treat<\/a>. But right now, rather selfishly, I just wish he was still alive and working, so that I would have more of his books to look forward to, and know that one of my heroes was still there.<\/p>\n<p>Sam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw the first reports on Twitter last night as I was finishing up the day&#8217;s writing: Russell Hoban has died. There have already been some fine things written about him. Here&#8217;s an obit in UK paper The Guardian. This one from his editor David Lloyd, is my favourite. Though his creativity remained as strong [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theycrawl.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}