Diana Wynne Jones

• 1. Introduction

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  Diana Wynne Jones was born in London on the 16th of August 1934, and by the time she died on the 26th of March 2011, she had written some of the most inventive fantasy fiction in the English language. Neil Gaiman, one of the most celebrated fantasy authors of his own generation, described her as "quite simply the best writer for children of her generation." That is not a small claim. Gaiman had already dedicated his 1991 comic mini-series The Books of Magic to four witches, and Jones was one of them.

  She wrote novels, poetry, short stories, literary criticism, and a nonfiction book about cliches in fantasy fiction that developed a cult following among writers and critics. She was twice a finalist for the Hugo Award, nominated fourteen times for the Locus Award, and won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007. The authors who name her as an inspiration include Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Robin McKinley, Penelope Lively, J. K. Rowling, and Megan Whalen Turner.

  So who was this woman whose peers revered her so consistently, and whose most famous novel became a celebrated Japanese animated film? And why, for years, were so many of her books out of print? Those questions take us back to a childhood in wartime England and a writing life that began, by her own account, mostly to keep her sanity.

• 2. A Wartime Childhood

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  Shortly after Jones's fifth birthday, war was announced, and she was evacuated from London to Pontarddulais in Wales, where her grandfather served as a minister at a chapel. The stay did not last long. A family dispute cut it short, and the family then moved repeatedly, spending time in the Lake District, in York, and back to London, before settling in Thaxted, Essex in 1943.

  In Thaxted, her parents ran an educational conference centre. Jones and her two younger sisters, Isobel and Ursula, were left largely to their own devices as children. Both sisters would go on to distinguished careers: Isobel became Professor Isobel Armstrong, the literary critic, and Ursula became an actress and a children's writer. The household produced remarkable people.

  Jones attended Friends' School in Saffron Walden, then read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. Her time at Oxford placed her in the lecture rooms of two authors whose names now define the fantasy canon: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. She graduated in 1956, married John Burrow, a scholar of medieval literature, in the same year, and had three sons. The couple lived in Oxford until 1976, when they moved to Bristol.

• 3. Writing to Stay Sane

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  Jones started writing in the mid-1960s, by her own description "mostly to keep her sanity." The youngest of her three children was about two years old at the time. The family lived in a house owned by an Oxford college, and she felt pressed on all sides: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a sister, and a friend with a daughter were all creating crises in the household.

  Her first published book was not a children's fantasy. It was a novel for adults called Changeover, published by Macmillan in 1970. The book grew out of the era when the British Empire was shedding its colonies. Jones recalled in 2004 that at the time it seemed as though "every month, we would hear that yet another small island or tiny country had been granted independence." The novel is set in a fictional African colony undergoing transition, and its central joke is that a memo about how to mark the changeover ceremonially is misread as being about a terrorist named Mark Changeover. It is a farce featuring government, police, and army bureaucracies, with sex, politics, and news all folded in. When Rhodesia declared independence unilaterally in 1965, Jones wrote that she felt as if the book were coming true as she wrote it.

  For Charmed Life, the first novel in her Chrestomanci series, she won the 1978 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. The prize is a once-in-a-lifetime award, judged by a panel of children's writers.

• 4. Howl and the Moving Castle

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  The 1986 novel Howl's Moving Castle began with a request from a boy at a school Jones was visiting, who asked her to write a book called The Moving Castle. She took up the idea and built an entire novel around it. Greenwillow published the book first in the United States, where it was a runner-up for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in children's fiction.

  In 2004, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki adapted the novel into an animated film. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. A version dubbed into English was released in the UK and US in 2005, with Christian Bale performing the voice of Howl.

  The film brought Jones's name to a much wider audience, but the novel had already earned its own honour by then. The Children's Literature Association gives the Phoenix Award each year to the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award. The name is drawn from the mythical bird, to suggest a book rising from obscurity. In 2006, Jones and Howl's Moving Castle received that award. The previous year's Phoenix runner-up was Fire and Hemlock, another Jones novel, this one based on Scottish ballads.

• 5. The Tough Guide and Other Legacies

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  The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is not a novel. It is a nonfiction book in which Jones catalogues and skewers the cliches of fantasy fiction, and it has attracted a devoted following among writers and critics despite an erratic printing history that made it difficult to find for years. A new edition published by Firebird Books in the United States in 2006 included additional material and a completely new design with a new map. The book was also a finalist for the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

  Jones won the British Fantasy Society's Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1999, which recognised her significant impact on the genre. The University of Bristol awarded her an honorary doctorate in July 2006. Neil Gaiman and Jones maintained a mutual admiration that showed up in concrete ways: she dedicated her 1993 novel Hexwood to him after a remark he made in conversation inspired a key part of the plot.

  Archer's Goon, published in 1984, was a runner-up for that year's Horn Book Award and was adapted for television in 1992. Many of her earlier children's books fell out of print in the years before the Harry Potter era, but were reissued when that series drew a new generation of young readers to fantasy. Jones was three times a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal: for Dogsbody, for Charmed Life, and for The Lives of Christopher Chant.

• 6. Final Years

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  Jones was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early summer of 2009. She had surgery in July and told friends that it had gone well. In June 2010 she announced that she would stop chemotherapy, explaining that it was only making her feel ill. She died on the 26th of March 2011.

  The novel she was writing when she became too ill to continue was called The Islands of Chaldea. Her sister Ursula Jones completed it, and it was published in 2014. Ursula Jones was interviewed by The Guardian in June 2013 after finishing the manuscript. She said that her sister had left behind "a mass of stuff" and that other things were coming to light, but no further new works appeared in print.

  In August 2014, Google commemorated Jones with a Doodle created by Google artist Sophie Diao. The World Fantasy Award she received in 2007 for Life Achievement was a recognition that arrived while she was still writing. The Mythopoeic Society nominated The Islands of Chaldea for its Fantasy Award for Children's Literature in 2015, four years after Jones died, giving that posthumous final novel a place alongside the rest of a body of work that her peers had spent decades acknowledging as exceptional.