Who is Roald Dahl?
Roald Dahl is a British author well known for writing books and stories for children and adults. He was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents and named for Roald Admunsen, a popular Norwegian polar explorer of the time. When Roald Dahl was four, his sister Astri and his father both passed away within the period of one month. His mother decided to remain in England, because Dahl’s father had specified that the children be educated in British schools, which he firmly believed to be the best in the world. It was an unusual decision for the time, when women were not generally encouraged to strike out on their own. Roald Dahl started at Llandaff Cathedral School, and later went to a series of boarding schools, an experience he profoundly disliked. Roald Dahl often wrote about his experiences in boarding schools, detailing them at length in his autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984). After he graduated from school, Dahl went to work for the Shell Oil Company, which posted
Anglia Television, a regional broadcaster in England, has had great worldwide success with their wildlife program “Survival.” Recently, in an effort to expand their world television market, Anglia approached Sir John Wolf, producer of The African Queen, The Odessa File, The Day of the Jackal and Oliver!, to develop a big budget dramatic series that would appeal to American, English and the international television audiences. The series, which began broadcasting last month on more than 70 television stations in America, is “Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected.” The 22 episodes to be broadcast this year are all adapted from the macabre stories of the British writer Roald Dahl, who personally supervised the adaptation of his prose into television script form. Roald Dahl became a writer almost by accident. Born in 1918 in Cardiff, England, where his father was a ship trader, his first adult job was as a representative of the Shell Oil Company in Africa. With the outbreak of World War II,
