Louise Sandall, who published under the name of Louise Cooper, died unexpectedly on October 20th 2009. She was 57. Louise had worked with the British Council and the BritLit project for a number of years and her writing had proved enormously popular with both teachers and students. She had generously contributed ideas and tales because she believed in the value of stories and story telling as part of the process of language acquisition. Earlier in 2009 she had made a trip to Barcelona where she visited a number of schools, along with her artist husband, Cas, and where she also took part in the APAC teachers’ association conference.

She made a deep impression on those she met while in Catalonia. The following is a tribute to Louise from teachers who worked with her.

Fitch O'Connell

The first time I met Louise Cooper I felt like I was greeting an old friend of mine. We wanted to learn as much as possible about the personality and the deeds of the author who was coming to visit our school, IES PAU VilA, in Sabadell. My students and I had spent some hours on her blog, and from her words we inferred she took pleasure in simple things and in a simple way of life. How often have we imagined an author to be a certain way because of their work or because of the manner they present themselves, and later however, we become disappointed at the real persona behind the author. On that occasion though, my fears proved to be totally unjustified. Louise was everything I had imagined and more. She was sweet, affectionate, sensitive, and incredibly approachable; a vivacious woman with a permanent smile on her face.

When I think of her three vivid images come to mind. The first being the sweetness in her voice and the devotion in her eyes when talking about her beloved husband Cas, her cats, and Cornwall, which she made her home because 'it felt like the right place to be'. The second is the energy and enthusiasm she used to encourage students to take up writing, and finally, her amazing ability to retreat to her creative spot even when surrounded by people.

I remember once in a Barcelona restaurant, when everyone was engaged in different conversations, I caught her eyes often drifting away to an invisible spot while her thoughts seemed to be sailing towards some distant horizons of her own. I couldn’t help asking her if while we, the non-writers, were talking about more mundane issues, her muse was inspiring her next work. 'Yes' she replied smiling, 'I am always in my own world and right now I am writing three different stories.'

Louise, I am sure that you didn't expect your own story to finish the way it did, neither did we. However, you will always be a lively and inspiring character in the stories of those who were lucky enough to have met you.

Josie Pont

It will be difficult to forget the day we met Louise Cooper, we were very nervous and concerned because she was coming to visit our school and we didn’t know how she’d react at seeing what our imagination had done with her stories

Despite our shyness, what we can remember the most is the smile of a woman while watching how some students had turned some of her stories into plays and films. Maybe our work was rudimentary but the aim of that project was not to make a blockbuster, it was just to honor her, the same as what we are doing now but, unfortunately, for a very different reason.

Now we are honoring her for the type of person we believe she was. Although we met her only once, through her attitude and the answers to our questions, it was easy to see she was a woman who seemed to be happy, who seemed to love what she had been doing over the years; writing. We remember her as an extrovert and fun woman with a prodigious imagination and a great sense of humour. I think happiness is something she passed on to all the people around her.

On behalf of all the 160 students who took part in the Louise Cooper project at IES PAU VILA Sabadell, and on behalf of our teacher Josie Pont,  we want to express our sadness for the loss of such a remarkable women and writer. 

Carles Bayod  
Batxillerat Pau Vila

I first met Louise and her husband Cas at my High School, IES Consell de Cent on Barcelona’s seafront on the 25th of February 2009. They were invited to Barcelona by the British Council and APAC to participate in the Meet the Author project of BritLit. My students had never met a British writer and to have Louise and Cas right there was like an open book.

The moment you meet Louise and you enter her universe reality and fiction unite and time, as we usually know it, stops. I will always treasure the moment when my students asked Louise about her house and what seemed a simple question sparkled magic. At that point Cas, who is an excellent artist, drew on the board ‘An Greftva’ (the House of Arts and Crafts), where Louise lived in St. Agnes, Cornwall, within sound of the sea and ten minutes' walk from the beach where she used to collect shells and go sailing on 'their small sailing dinghy'.

Cas also drew their garden 'full of life and wildlife and a lot of inspiration' with her big black cat Simba and smoke coming out of the chimney. It felt like the first page of a novel where you get to know where the main character lives and you thrive for more. Then, the moment Louise and Cas started singing shanties their house looked more like a floating house, with a lovely couple roaming on the sea shore and Simba as the cook who writes a blat 'not a blog, because blog rhymes with dog' in his free time to the children who have a Louise Cooper book on their bedside table. Louise was wearing a striped blue and white shirt on that day, I have a clear picture of it in my mind because a student drew a portrait of her after she left so the sea image was even more powerful.

Like the characters of a fairy tale, this is how I will always remember Louise and Cas, and although some of her short stories strike the reader as scary, their twist in the tale makes them rooted into human experience and force you to question what’s the real meaning of life. As my students noticed, lots of Louise’s characters ‘dropped dead’ at the end of the story. I believe, for Louise it was a way of shouting out loud ‘Carpe diem’, ‘Carpe diem’, Carpe diem’… Seize the day!

After her visit Louise took time to record a cd of sea shanties with songs from her Shantie group the ‘Falmouth Shout’ which she sent to the kids in my school; she also took the time to write a cooperative story with my students entitled the Golden Fish and found out possibilities of setting up a pen-pal exchange between my school and a school in her area. In short, she went out of her way to get the kids involved. She was a writer devoted not only to writing but to children, to imagination and to saving lives at sea through her commitment with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

The sea metaphor again, and like a wave that never ends but gives birth to itself again as it reaches the shore, Louise’s legacy is alive and her stories are for us, her readers, our lighthouse. 

Laura Nogués

I met Louise Cooper when I joined the BritLit ‘Meet the Author’ project, and had the great privilege to have her visit our school. My first impression of her was of a quiet, unassuming woman who was totally at ease with people of all ages, a woman who was in love with the full life she led, and who had a really fun if dark sense of humour. Her story Genie-us had inspired a whole year group to write their own versions of whacky fairytales, and they certainly put more effort into that one story than they have ever put into any piece of writing. When she came, the students read their tales for her, to which Louise listened with rapt attention, and she later regaled them with stories of how she met Cas, her life by the sea, her writing, and even sang a sea shanty to which they had to sing along.

In the short interview that followed, she managed to convey the idea that writing was fun, and actually easy, once you let your imagination soar, and inspiration comes from the unlikeliest of everyday situations. My students and I had always hoped she would come back, and we are very sad that she will no longer do so. However, her memory will live on in the Short and Scary collection, now firmly on our 2ESO reading list, and in the stories she continues to inspire in our students. I love all of her short stories, for their celebration of the power of the imagination, but my personal favourite, apart from her ‘Sticky Ending’ pieces, is Foot and Mouth, because of its message of open-mindedness, and the perils of pre-conceived notions. This ‘awesome’ woman, as one of my students described her, touched us in a special way with her visit, and, like a happier version of her wizard, turned our imaginations and hearts to gold, and we feel so lucky to have known her. She may be gone, but she will never be forgotten.

Marie Farrell

I met Louise in February of 2009 when she came to visit schools in Barcelona and Sabadell as part of the BritLit project. Louise didn't like flying, and it was the first time that she had been persuaded to visit schools abroad. If she had any apprehensions about how the visits would go, these were soon dispelled; the ‘meet the author’ experience was a great success on both sides. The students were very enthusiastic about meeting the person whose work they had been studying for several weeks, and Louise was absolutely delighted to see the performances that the students had been working on.

I accompanied Louise and her husband Cas Sandall, to four different schools, in very different parts of Barcelona.  The first one was a school in Parallel, in inner city Barcelona. Laura Nogués’s students performed Louise’s poem ‘Silly Billy’, and they interviewed her too. Louise seemed very at home in the classroom, responding warmly to the students, and obliging with some sea shanty singing, which the students loved.

There was some more sea shanty singing at Betania Patmos, and Louise heard some wonderful stories that the students of Marie Farrell had come up with, inspired by Louise’s story ‘Genie-Us’. When Louise heard that one story would be about pirates, her eyes lit up, and she leant forward in anticipation… There were more questions from the students, and one question led Louise to recount how she had met her husband, Cas: she said that she had been in a café in London, and that a voice in her head had told her that she should go and sit down next to the man sitting at the table…The students all applauded loudly! We also heard that Louise kept mulling over ideas in her head, and that she was still wondering what was going to happen with the woman carrying a suitcase at the train station… What was in the case? Where was the woman going? Louise hadn’t decided yet.

In IES Menendez i Pelayo, students of Giselle Dubois put on various plays, and also set up a ‘scary crime’, whereby Louise had to decide which of her characters had committed a crime. Louise got straight into the role, trying to puzzle out who might be the culprit. Later she signed all the students’ copies of her book ‘Short and Scary’. You could really see how pleased the students were to meet her, and to find that she was such a friendly, interested and approachable person.

Finally we visited IES Pau Vila in Sabadell, where Josie Pont had been working with Louise’s stories with 5 classes.  We saw some wildly inventive plays, which were continuations of the story ‘Emergency landing’. These were followed by some films that the Batxillerato students had made of Louise’s stories. The inventiveness of the films, and their technical aplomb, were truly astonishing, and it was clear that Louise was having a wonderful time. Finally students presented Louise with posters which described how they felt about reading her stories and working on the project. It was a brilliant way to finish Louise’s visit.

We were all shocked and saddened to hear of Louise’s sudden death this October. Louise had tremendous enthusiasm for literature and for life. When she read her stories to the students, you could see that these were stories that she had inhabited very intensely; she knew the voices of all the characters.  In her community in Cornwall, Louise was involved in many things; sea shanty singing, visiting the local primary school, raising money & volunteering for the lifeboat association, among other things.  It was a great experience for me to meet Louise and get to know her for a few days. Although she had never visited schools abroad before, she reacted totally naturally in each different school, responding to the people she met, and she charmed the students with her genuine interest in their lives and their ideas. She will be greatly missed.

Joanna Dossetor

Louise Cooper first arrived in our school, IES Menéndez y Pelayo, in Barcelona, as the author of one of the best short story fantasy books for teenagers we have ever come across (Short & Scary). The reading of her book and later the visit of the author to our school, was part of a BritLit project called “Meet the Author” sponsored by the British Council and APAC (Asociació de Professors d’Anglès de Catalunya).

From early January, she started to be a daily presence in my classes fascinating my students with her strange and sometimes creepy characters, puzzling them with surprising stories of hair-raising endings. We all wanted to know more about this lady who exercised such a magnetic power on all of us, and we delved into her great website to know about her life, her cat Simba, and her magic universe of long walks by the sea, a house with a garden and shanty songs.

Louise’s presence altered the dynamic of my classes. One day you could see a group of students, books in hand, trapped by the reading of one of her stories while others were printing or cutting out pictures to compose creative posters on her work and life. Another day the whole class had moved to the school theatre and there they were, with Louise’s books in one hand moving on the stage like a werewolf, a monster, a vampire, a ghost or an alien. Students were delighted playing the role of her fascinating characters and recreating them from their own perspective.  Thus, Louise’s world was captured and expressed according to the feelings of very young teenagers who wanted to show her, on the “Big Day” (that was the way we called the day when Louise would come and meet them at school) how much she had made them enjoy literature, how much they loved her...

And the “Big Day” arrived. Students, teachers and even parents waited patiently at the school theatre for Louise’s arrival. When she entered, I could see how the eyes of my young students lit up with excitement as Louise was walking to the stage. Her mere presence filled the space. 

She watched the performance of her stories acted by my students, and she even participated in one of them as a main character. When she was invited to read one of her stories, which she did in a soft, rich voice, it sounded as if she had cast a spell on all of us... a magic moment. 

Later, she spent some time book signing and answering students’ questions. Always smiling, always attentive to every single detail, she had a word for everyone, an enchanted word which we will not miss because it will stay deeply rooted in our hearts as a life experience of joy and inspiration... Thank you Louise!

Giselle Dubois