Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm has been on and off our bookshelves and the BBC since 1933. Why do we keep coming back to him?
I was about half way into a PhD on British children’s science literature before I even heard of Professor Branestawm. I’d mention my work at conferences and older academics would say “ah, children’s science books eh, well you simply must write about Branestawm.”
Brane-what? But I dug around the back of some libraries, Googled, asked around, and discovered a series of fiction books which had impressively run steadily from 1933 to the 1980s.