Joan Aiken

Joan Delano Aiken was an English novelist and short-story writer whose alternative-historical adventure novels for children, beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase in 1962, made her one of the most prolific and beloved English children's writers of the second half of the twentieth century. She was born on September 4, 1924, in Rye, Sussex, the daughter of the American poet Conrad Aiken and the Canadian writer Jessie MacDonald, and grew up partly in the village of Mermaid Street and partly in the household of her stepfather, the English writer Martin Armstrong.

Educated at home until she was 12, she sold her first stories to the BBC in her teens and worked at the United Nations Information Centre in London and as a features editor at Argosy magazine. After the death of her first husband in 1955 she supported her two children through freelance writing, turning to children's fiction in earnest with The Kingdom and the Cave (1960).

Her best-known sequence — beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), and Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966) and continuing for a dozen further volumes — is set in an imaginary Stuart England in which James III still reigns and wolves migrate through the Channel Tunnel. Her short-story collections, including A Necklace of Raindrops (1968) and A Harp of Fishbones (1972), are staples of English-language children's anthologies. She also wrote adult suspense novels, several Jane Austen continuations including Mansfield Revisited (1984), and a guide for young writers, The Way to Write for Children (1982).

She received the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1972 for Night Fall and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1969 for The Whispering Mountain, was made an MBE in 1999, and continued to publish into her seventies. She died at her home in Petworth, Sussex, on January 4, 2004, at the age of 79.

Her name Joan is the medieval English form of the Old French Jehanne, ultimately from the Hebrew Yôḥānān meaning "Yahweh is gracious" — the feminine counterpart to John. Borne by Joan of Arc and a long line of English queens, the name reached its English peak between 1900 and 1940; she received it from her American father, who admired its plain Englishness.