David Rees
David Bartlett Rees was a British author and educator born on May 18, 1936, in London, England. Growing up during World War II, he experienced the London blitz and was evacuated to Devon, which influenced his later writing. After completing his degree in English at Queen's College, Cambridge, Rees worked as a schoolmaster before transitioning to a lecturer at St. Luke's College in Exeter and later at the University of Exeter. He published his first novel, *Storm Surge*, in 1975 and went on to write over forty novels, many aimed at young adults, including notable works like *The Exeter Blitz*, which reflects on the air raids in Exeter during the war. Rees also explored themes of identity and history, particularly in *The Green Bough of Liberty*, which connects to his own ancestral history. In 1982, he relocated to California to teach at San Jose State University and later founded Third House Press, focusing on publishing works with gay themes. Rees, who passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1993, is remembered for his compassionate depictions of young people navigating complex social issues, earning accolades such as the Carnegie Medal for his impactful storytelling.
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David Rees
Author
- Born: May 18, 1936
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: May 22, 1993
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
David Bartlett Rees was born on May 18, 1936, in London, England. His father, Gerald Rees, was a civil servant, and his mother, Margaret Healy Rees, was a homemaker. Rees and his family lived in a London suburb during the blitz of 1940-1941. Rees was evacuated to the north coast of Devon, living there from 1943 to 1945. After the war, he attended King’s College School in Wimbledon, but he did not fit in well at this school that emphasized athletics and military training.
Rees studied English on a scholarship at Queen’s College in Cambridge, graduating in 1958, and after a two-year tour of Europe he worked as a schoolmaster in London secondary schools from 1960 to 1965. From 1965 to 1968, he taught in Ickenham, and then he moved to Exeter, the setting for many of his novels. While living in Ickenham, he married Jenny Lee Watkins in 1966. The couple had two sons, Stephen and Adam, before divorcing in 1974.
In 1968, Rees joined the faculty of St. Luke’s College in Exeter, and lectured there until 1978 when he became a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. Rees had always wanted to be a writer, and his first novel, Storm Surge, was published in 1975. After this first book, he published two or three novels each year, many of them for young adults.
Rees’s most important novel was The Exeter Blitz (1978), a historical novel about the air raids on Exeter during World War II. He later commented that he had drawn on his own memories of the London bombings in writing The Exeter Blitz. For another of his important books, The Green Bough of Liberty (1979), Rees combined historical and genealogical research to tell a story about the Irish uprising of 1798 in which his ancestors had participated. That same year he published In the Tent, the first of his young adult novels featuring gay characters.
In 1982, Rees moved to California to become a visiting professor at San Jose State University. By 1984, with nearly two dozen published books, Rees quit teaching to devote himself to writing full time. With another writer, Peter Robins, Rees founded Third House Press, a publisher specializing in writing with gay themes; their first publication was Oranges and Lemons: Stories by Gay Men, which they edited.
After publishing more than forty novels, most of them for young adults, Rees published Not for Your Hands: An Autobiography, in 1992. Rees died of complications related to AIDS on May 22, 1993, in London. Rees’s novels are regarded for their sensitive portrayals of adolescents confronting difficult and controversial situations. The Exeter Blitz won the Carnegie Medal from the British Library Association.