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Joan Aiken

Joan Aiken
MBE
JoanAiken.jpg
Aiken at The Hermitage, her home, in 1984
Born Joan Delano Aiken
(1924-09-04)4 September 1924
Rye, Sussex, England
Died 4 January 2004 (2004-01-05) (aged 79)
Petworth, Sussex
Occupation Writer
Nationality British
Period 1955–2004
Genre Alternative history, children's literature, supernatural fiction
Notable works The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (Wolves Chronicles)
Notable awards Guardian Prize
1969
Website
www.joanaiken.com

Joan Delano Aiken (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.

Aiken was born in Mermaid Street in Rye, Sussex, on 4 September 1924. Her father was the American Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Conrad Aiken (1889–1973). Her older brother was the writer John Aiken (1913–1990), and her older sister was the writer Jane Aiken Hodge (1917–2009). Their mother, Canadian-born Jessie MacDonald (1889–1970), was a Master's graduate from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jessie and Conrad's marriage was dissolved in 1929, and Jessie married the English writer Martin Armstrong in 1930. Conrad Aiken went on to marry twice more. Together with her brother John and her sister Jane, Joan Aiken wrote Conrad Aiken Remembered (1989), a short appreciation of their father.

Aiken was taught at home by her mother until the age of twelve and from 1936 to 1940 at Wychwood School for girls in Oxford. She did not attend university. Writing stories from an early age, she finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen and had her first short story for adults accepted for publication when she was seventeen. In 1941 her first children's story was broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour.


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