About: Margaret Read
Full Name
Margaret Read MacDonald
Website
http://www.margaretreadmacdonald.com
Details
Biography of Margaret Read MacDonald Margaret began telling stories as a children’s librarian in 1965. She retired from the King County Library System in 2002 and has been traveling incessantly ever since. Her daughter and son-in-law, Jen and Nat Whitman (The Whitman Story Sampler), taught in Hong Kong for the past six years, so many trips were based out of Hong Kong. Now they are in Bonn, Germany, so Margaret’s near future travels may lean more in that direction. Margaret received her Ph.D. in Folklore from Indiana University in 1979 and published her dissertation as The Storyteller’s Sourcebook: A Title, Subject, and Motif-Index to Folktale Collections for Children (Gale Research, 1982). While teaching a course in storytelling for the University of Washington, she realized she needed a collection of sure-fire tales for her students to cut their teeth on. So she wrote Twenty Tellable Tales. Many more tale collections followed and now she delights in discovering tales most tellers have not heard yet and putting those into books for others to share. Her stories are all written with the next teller in mind. They are shaped for ease of telling. And she hopes that they will be taken up and passed on. In the last few years Margaret has been delighted to see several of her books translated. Into Spanish, Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, Korean, French, and Japanese. She was especially pleased at the chance to work directly with Paula Martín (Argentina), Jocelyn Chuang (Taiwan), and Masako Sueyoshi (Japan) in order to get translations which were ‘tellable’…not just literal translations. We worked with the texts until they sounded perfect in the translated language. You can read much more about Margaret, see photos, and find a list of the 50 plus books she has written at: http://www.margaretreadmacdonald.com
