Leila Berg

Who was Leila Berg?

Leila Berg was a British children's author, known also as a journalist and writer on education and children's rights. She began writing in a more realistic and gritty style, for younger children, in the 1960s, in the Nippers series of readers in an influential move designed to bring children's books closer to ordinary, real, urban life, and away from the Janet and John reader style. She was awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Award in 1973 for her work.

She was brought up in Salford, Lancashire, in a Jewish doctor's family; she wrote vividly about this part of her life in Flickerbook. There she describes also later meetings in Cambridge through her older brother, particularly with Margot Heinemann, and J. B. S. Haldane whom she would reference obliquely in the early Chunky books. She associated with Young Communist League members at the time of the Spanish Civil War and eventually joined it. Her first job as a journalist was with the British communist daily paper The Daily Worker.

She was influenced in her thinking by psychologist Susan Isaacs. After working as a journalist in World War II, during which she married and started a family, she started to write children's fiction.