Ten top fairy tales

Severely dyslexic Sally Gardner, who couldn't read until she was 14, won the Carnegie medal and the Costa children's books award with her novel for teens, Maggot Moon. Tinder, her latest book, was inspired by the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Tinderbox.

One of Gardner's top ten fairy tales, as told to the Guardian:

Snow White

In 1938, at the age of 14, my mother became obsessed with the Walt Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was the first full-length cartoon Walt Disney Studios produced. Walt stayed close to the Grimms' version and the film held nearly everyone who saw it under its spell. In A Book of Princesses, which I wrote in 1997, I asked myself a series of questions relating to each of the fairy tales I wanted to retell. In Snow White I considered how the step-mother, the evil queen, found her way to the dwarfs' cottage not once but three times. I would have thought once into the woods would have been more than enough.

It is a story about jealousy. Jealousy of youth, beauty and a pure soul. Like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White is thought dead and lies in a glass casket, though every year she grows more a beautiful until at seventeen she is woken by her prince. The step-mother is long dead.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue