Author of the week: David Benedictus

last updated 8 January 2015

The author of a new, fully authorized Winnie-the-Pooh sequel was no childhood fan of the bear, said Frances Hardy in the London Daily Mail. David Benedictus, now 71, admits that as a young boy in London he much preferred the poetry of A.A. Milne to his children’s tales. But the boy aesthete grew up to be a jack-of-all-trades, and in the 1990s, while working as a radio producer, Benedictus was asked to dramatize the Pooh stories for an audiobook. He became enamored of their concision and, like countless fans before him, submitted a few Pooh stories of his own to Milne’s estate. A decade passed. “Then one shiny day,” he says, “I learned that the trustees had been trying to trace me.” The rights to Pooh had reverted from Disney to Milne’s heirs. “They liked my first story,” he recalls. “Would I suggest some more?”

In Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, published last week, most of Pooh’s mates seem their old selves, said Felicia R. Lee in The New York Times. Benedictus has added an otter named Lottie, though, and he’s given Eeyore just enough spunk that the gloomy donkey no longer plays perpetual victim. Still, “you can’t turn him into Gary Cooper or something,” he says. Benedictus wound up dedicating four years to capturing Milne’s voice. All he can do now, he says, is try not to become an Eeyore about the book’s prospects. “At worst, everyone will hate me and I’ll just crawl under a bush and hide,” he says. “I can live with that.”