The Complete Short Stories: Volume One

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In 2002, one of Cardiff Bay's modern landmarks, the Oval Basin plaza, was renamed Roald Dahl Plass. Plass is Norwegian for "place" or "square", alluding to the writer's Norwegian roots. There have also been calls from the public for a permanent statue of him to be erected in Cardiff. [155] In 2016, the city celebrated the centenary of Dahl's birth in Llandaff. Welsh Arts organisations, including National Theatre Wales, Wales Millennium Centre and Literature Wales, came together for a series of events, titled Roald Dahl 100, including a Cardiff-wide City of the Unexpected, which marked his legacy. [6] Chantal Sophia "Tessa" (born 1957), who became an author, and mother of author, cookbook writer and former model Sophie Dahl (after whom Sophie in The BFG is named); [83] Oxford University Press to capture Roald Dahl's naughtiest language for the first time: World Book Day!". Cardiff Times. 7 March 2019. Dahl died on November 23, 1990, at the age of 74. After suffering an unspecified infection, on November 12, 1990, Dahl had been admitted to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England.

A UK television special titled Roald Dahl's Revolting Rule Book which was hosted by Richard E. Grant and aired on 22 September 2007, commemorated Dahl's 90th birthday and also celebrated his impact as a children's author in popular culture. [131] It also featured eight main rules he applied on all his children's books: In 2016, marking the centenary of Dahl's birth, Rennie compiled The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary which includes many of his invented words and their meaning. [130] Rennie commented that some of Dahl's words have already escaped his world, for example, Scrumdiddlyumptious: "Food that is utterly delicious". [130] In his poetry, Dahl gives a humorous re-interpretation of well-known nursery rhymes and fairy tales, parodying the narratives and providing surprise endings in place of the traditional happily-ever-after. Dahl's collection of poems, Revolting Rhymes, is recorded in audiobook form, and narrated by actor Alan Cumming. [132] ScreenplaysSwitch Bitch (1974) is a book of adult short stories by British writer Roald Dahl. Four stories, originally published in Playboy between 1965 and 1974, [1] are collected. They are linked by themes of rape by deception: in each one, some major act of cunning, cruelty, or hedonism underpins the sexuality. The stories in Switch Bitch have been rightly slammed for their cruel and misogynistic aspects. The central motive of ‘The Last Act’ has been particularly decried, and even Dahl’s biographer, Jeremy Treglown, said that the story was better off being scrapped as it has “no purpose as a mechanism other than to lead to a crudely sensationalist conclusion.” Either way, the New Yorker rejected ‘William and Mary’ when it was sent to them in 1954, and again three years later. Between February 1957 and March 1959, six other stories suffered the same fate, including the repulsive ‘Pig’, in which an orphan brought up as a vegetarian is slaughtered in an abattoir; ‘Genesis and Catastrophe’, an ironical account of the birth of Hitler; and ‘Royal Jelly’, an excess of which causes a baby to turn into a bee!

In November 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as an aircraftman with service number 774022. [56] After a 600-mile (970km) car journey from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for flight training with sixteen other men, of whom only three survived the war. With seven hours and 40 minutes experience in a De Havilland Tiger Moth, he flew solo; [57] Dahl enjoyed watching the wildlife of Kenya during his flights. He continued to advanced flying training in Iraq, at RAF Habbaniya, 50 miles (80km) west of Baghdad. Following six months' training on Hawker Harts, Dahl was commissioned as a pilot officer on 24 August 1940, and was judged ready to join a squadron and face the enemy. [56] [58] Dahl was flying a Gloster Gladiator when he crash landed in LibyaOne common theme amongst many Roald Dahl’s stories is a young child seeking revenge on evil adults and wrongdoers. Dahl has invented more than 500 memorable words and character names across his work, such as Oompa-Loompa, scrumdiddlyumptious, snozzcumbers and frobscottle. Another interesting (lesser-known) fact about Roald Dahl is that he named his fantasy language Gobblefunk. The Oxford University Press even created a unique Roald Dahl Dictionary, which featured nearly 8000 words he used in his stories. Dahl liked ghost stories, and claimed that Trolls by Jonas Lie was one of the finest ghost stories ever written. While he was still a youngster, his mother, Sofie Dahl, related traditional Norwegian myths and legends from her native homeland to Dahl and his sisters. Dahl always maintained that his mother and her stories had a strong influence on his writing. In one interview, he mentioned: "She was a great teller of tales. Her memory was prodigious and nothing that ever happened to her in her life was forgotten." [142] When Dahl started writing and publishing his famous books for children, he included a grandmother character in The Witches, and later said that she was based directly on his own mother as a tribute. [143] [144] Television And that he did. After Dahl graduated from Repton in 1932, he went on an expedition to Newfoundland. Afterward, he took a job with the Shell Oil Company in Tanzania, Africa, where he remained until 1939. For a brief period in the 1960s, Dahl wrote screenplays. Two, the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, were adaptations of novels by Ian Fleming. [133] [134] Dahl also began adapting his own novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was completed and rewritten by David Seltzer after Dahl failed to meet deadlines, and produced as the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). Dahl later disowned the film, saying he was "disappointed" because "he thought it placed too much emphasis on Willy Wonka and not enough on Charlie". [135] He was also "infuriated" by the deviations in the plot devised by David Seltzer in his draft of the screenplay. This resulted in his refusal for any more versions of the book to be made in his lifetime, as well as an adaptation for the sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. [136]