Jill Paton Walsh

Jill Paton Walsh, CBE, FRSL (born 29 April 1937) is an English novelist and children's writer. She may be known best for the Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane mysteries that have completed or continued the work of Dorothy Sayers.

Born Gillian Bliss, she was educated at St. Michael's Convent,North Finchley, London, and she read English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. She lives in Cambridge. In 1961, she married Antony Paton Walsh (died 30 December 2003); the couple had one son and two daughters. In 2004, she married John Rowe Townsend, who died in 2014.

Her brother, Christopher, was Nuffield Professor of International Economics at Oxford University (1992–2007) and a Fellow of Nuffield College (1977–2007).

In 1996, Paton Walsh received the CBE for services to literature and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1998 she won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association, recognising A Chance Child as the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award.

In an essay on realism in children's literature, Walsh stated that realism (like fantasy) is also metaphorical, and that she would like the relationship between the reader and her characters Bill and Julie to be as metaphorical as that between "dragons and the reader's greed or courage".

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