Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh

Written by Ann Thwaite and Frank Cottrell Boyce

Narrated by Simon Vance

Goodbye Christopher Robin: A.A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh is drawn from Ann Thwaite's Whitbread Award-winning biography of A. A. Milne, one of England's most successful writers.

After serving in the First World War, Milne wrote a number of well-received plays, but his greatest triumph came when he created Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, and, of course, Christopher Robin, the adventurous little boy based on his own son. Goodbye Christopher Robin inspired the film directed by Simon Curtis and starring Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, and Kelly Macdonald. It offers the listener a glimpse into the relationship between Milne and the real-life Christopher Robin, whose toys inspired the magical world of the Hundred Acre Wood.

Goodbye Christopher Robin is a story of celebrity, a story of both the joys and pains of success, and, ultimately, the story of how one man created a series of enchanting tales that brought hope and comfort to an England ravaged by the First World War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798765087466

Ann Thwaite

Ann Thwaite is a Whitbread-prize winning biographer and children’s writer. She was born in London, spent the war years in New Zealand and was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s, Barnet and St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Ann has travelled extensively and has lived in Tokyo, Benghazi and Nashville and is now settled in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite. Ann has written five major biographies. The first, of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of The Secret Garden, was published in 1974. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape won the 1985 Duff Cooper Prize and was described by John Carey as “one of the finest literary biographies of our time.” Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife, is widely regarded as the most interesting biography of Tennyson himself. Glimpses of the Wonderful, a life of Edmund’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D.J. Taylor in the Independent as one of the ‘Ten Best Biographies' ever. AA Milne: His Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year 1990, and The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh, a scrapbook off-shoot of her Milne biography was published in 1992. For many years, Ann wrote and reviewed children's books, as well as running a library for local children in her home. A history of her own family called Passageways: The Story of a New Zealand Family was published in 2009. Ann is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University (National Centre for Research into Children's Literature). She also has an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia and a D.Litt from Oxford.