Roald Dahl’s books give children an ‘escape’ from reality, daughter says

Picture this. Two parents are arguing, and their child slips away unnoticed, up to the bedroom before pulling out a book and settling down to read, becoming so immersed in the fictional world that the noise below begins to fade.

It's a scenario that Lucy Dahl, daughter to renowned British children's author Roald Dahl, has been told about many times as friends regale her with tales of her father's books serving as their means of escape. He penned a variety of children's books including The BFG, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach.

"They reached for James and the Giant Peach and just felt like they had a friend and didn't feel like they were alone any more," Lucy Dahl said. "I think all of his stories do have an escape from the cruel reality that children live through at some point in their childhoods."

And his work didn't help just her friends. Roald Dahl, who sold more than 200 million books, is one of the most successful children's authors to date. He also wrote adult stories before turning to children's fiction. To honour him and his lasting impact, every year the world celebrates his birthday on Sept. 13, which has been dubbed Roald Dahl Day. This year the day is especially meaningful as it marks 100 years since he was born (Dahl died in 1990). The annual celebrations, which have taken place since 2006, span the globe and include a host of events in libraries, classrooms, bookstores and public spaces, as well as fan-organized parties. This centennial year has also seen the release of the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary, filled with words of his creation.

Lucy Dahl said she will be celebrating this year's event with a number of other birthdays that fall around the date, including that of her daughter and niece. A screenwriter in her own right, Dahl said her father's work "takes reality and exaggerates it 1,000 times." She believes children identify with his stories because "the child always ends up on top and kids need to know that and hear that."

To this day, she receives letters from parents who have seen their previously uninterested children turning to reading for the first time. "We get letters after letters after letters sometimes saying, 'I don't know how I can thank you enough. My child is 10, 11 or 12 and has refused to read his entire life, whether he's dyslexic or just doesn't like it or has ADHD, and because of these stories my child's life has changed. He's asking when he can get the next book and he wants to read them all, and what would you suggest he read after Dahl?'" she said. "It's really a marvellous thing."

With time, Dahl's stories have moved beyond their pages and branched off into other media, serving as inspiration for films and plays. Matilda was made into a film in 1996 and was first performed as a musical in 2010, which is now playing in Toronto as a Mirvish production. A Steven Spielberg film version of The BFG was released this summer.

Dahl said the creation of the BFG movie was particularly meaningful to her, as he is her favourite character among her father's creations. While she grew up, the tale of the BFG was one of her most frequent bedtime stories. But her father waited to publish it as a book until she left home, correctly guessing that sharing the story with the rest of the world might not go over too well with his daughter.

"I was like, 'Hey, that's my BFG. You can't give the BFG to every other kid in the world!' But I got over it," Dahl said. "I was delighted when the film came out and it was so beautifully done."

Beyond his work as a children's author, Roald Dahl lived an interesting life, some of which wasn't revealed to his family until just years ago. With the publication of the biography Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl in 2010, it became public knowledge that the author worked as a British spy in America during the Second World War. Dahl says some details from her childhood make more sense now because of this information, including pictures she'd seen of her father "having tea" on the White House lawn with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The secrecy is even more impressive, Dahl says, because her father was "a terrible gossip."

"He had three sisters so he certainly knew how to gossip like the best of them," she said. "The fact that he was a spy and really took that to his grave and didn't tell anybody is phenomenal."