Many people write pony books and then write them off as genre fiction, but K. M. Peyton proves that genre is no barrier to excellence. Her works never fail to impress. She began penning her first book, Sabre, the Horse from the Sea, at fifteen, using her maiden name, Kathleen Herald. She had been writing since the age of nine.
Kathleen Peyton did not own a pony when she was a child, but she did ride on occasion. She possessed a talent for absorbing the technical horse books she read and transforming them into entirely convincing prose, as well as an extensive imaginary stable meticulously documented in notebooks.
It was at Manchester Art School, where she met her husband Mike, a former prisoner of war, that she received her artistic training. She attended Kingston School of Art first. She was 21 when she married him, and her first novels under the pen name K. M. Peyton were about sailing since that was their shared passion.
The Edge of the Cloud, the second book in the Flambards series, which was set during the First World War and resulted from her transition from writing about boats to horses, earned her a Carnegie Medal. Perhaps K. M. Peyton’s most famous work is Flambards, which was adapted into a television series and starred Christine McKenna.
Kathy spent three years as a high school teacher in Northampton after graduating from Oxford University, but she and Michael had already started a writing career. He was an avid sailor and adventurer. He helped pen the simple adventure stories K and M Peyton wrote for Boy Scout magazine. However, the publisher chose KM Peyton as the sole author for the first one, North to Adventure (1958), when it was published.
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