The finest of his books, The Discarded Image, based on a series of his lectures, appeared after his death and remains the best short introduction there is to how people used to imagine the universe they inhabited.
- Professor Helen Cooper
The author CS Lewis, best known to the general public for his children’s classics The Chronicles of Narnia, died 50 years ago on 22 November. He was much more than a children’s author: he was also a brilliant scholar, holding prestigious academic positions first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, as well as an influential Christian thinker.
In 1954, Lewis was awarded the chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a post that was founded with him in mind. In order to support research in that broad field of Lewis’s interests, Cambridge University is in the process of establishing a CS Lewis Scholarship that will help to fund an outstanding graduate student.
Lewis will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey at a ceremony on the anniversary of his death. His memorial will join those of some of the most famous names in English literature including poets Milton, Eliot and Wordsworth, playwrights Marlowe, Shakespeare and Wilde, and novelists Austen, Lawrence and Thackeray.
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Image: The Searcher, a statue of CS Lewis by sculptor, Ross Wilson, at Holywood Arches Library in Belfast
Credit: GeeJo via Wikimedia
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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