The acclaimed novelist and scholar C. S. Lewis is to be honoured with a memorial stone at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.
BBC News reports that a service will be held on 22 November 2013 to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, which was overshadowed at the time by the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the same day.
Lewis is best known as the writer of the Chronicles of Narnia novels, a 7-book series that has sold over 100 million copies globally and has been adapted for stage, TV and film countless times. [Anyone else remember that classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe BBC series from the late ’80s?]
Aside from children’s novels Lewis wrote a number of essays and works on various topics, many of which involved Christianity and theology including The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, and his beliefs even extended into the Narnia series, with it’s overarching theme of Good overcoming Evil drawing heavily from The Bible and Aslan, the main character in the series, created by Lewis as a representation of Jesus Christ.
Lewis’s memorial stone is part of a tradition that goes back 600 years, and will see him join literary legends including John Keats, William Blake and TS Eliot. The Abbey’s Canon Theologian, Vernon White said, “Lewis was an extraordinarily imaginative thinker and writer who was able to convey Christianity in a way that made it credible and attractive.”