Diana Wynne Jones (16 August 1934 � 26 March 2011)[1] was a British novelist, poet,

academic, literary critic, and short story writer. She principally wrote fantasy
and speculative fiction novels for children and adults.

Some of her better-known works are the Chrestomanci series, the Dalemark series;
the novels Howl's Moving Castle and Dark Lord of Derkholm; and The Tough Guide To
Fantasyland.

She has been cited as an inspiration and muse for several fantasy and science
fiction authors: including Phillip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Penelope
Lively, Robin McKinley, Megan Whalen Turner, J K Rowling and Dina Rabinovitch.

Her work has been nominated for several awards, among them twice as a finalist for
the Hugo Award, fourteen times for the Locus Award, seven times for the Mythopoeic
Award (which she would win twice out of those seven nominations), twice for a
British Fantasy Award (won in 1999), and twice for a World Fantasy Award, which she
would also end up winning in 2007.

Jones' work often explores themes of time travel, parallel and/or multiple
universes. Her work is usually described as fantasy, though some also incorporate
heavy science fiction themes and elements of realism.

Contents
1 Early life and marriage
2 Career
3 Illness and death
4 Works
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
Early life and marriage
Diana was born in London, the daughter of Marjorie (n�e Jackson) and Richard
Aneurin Jones, both of whom were teachers.[2] When war was announced, shortly after
her fifth birthday, she was evacuated to Wales, and thereafter moved several times,
including periods in Coniston Water, in York, and back in London. In 1943 her
family finally settled in Thaxted, Essex, where her parents worked running an
educational conference centre.[2] There, Jones and her two younger sisters Isobel
(later Professor Isobel Armstrong, the literary critic) and Ursula (later an
actress and a children's writer) spent a childhood left chiefly to their own
devices. After attending the Friends School Saffron Walden, she studied English at
St Anne's College in Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C. S. Lewis and J.
R. R. Tolkien before graduating in 1956.[3] In the same year she married John
Burrow, a scholar of medieval literature, with whom she had three sons, Richard,
Michael and Colin. After a brief period in London, in 1957 the couple returned to
Oxford, where they stayed until moving to Bristol in 1976.[2]

According to her autobiography, Jones decided she was an atheist when she was a
child.[4]

Career
Jones started writing during the mid-1960s "mostly to keep my sanity", when the
youngest of her three children was about two years old and the family lived in a
house owned by an Oxford college. Beside the children, she felt harried by the
crises of adults in the household: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a sister, and a
friend with daughter.[5] Her first book was a novel for adults published by
Macmillan in 1970, entitled Changeover. It originated as the British Empire was
divesting colonies; she recalled in 2004 that it had "seemed like every month, we
would hear that yet another small island or tiny country had been granted
independence."[5] Changeover is set in a fictional African colony during
transition, and begins as a memo about the problem of how to "mark changeover"
ceremonially is misunderstood to be about the threat of a terrorist named Mark
Changeover. It is a farce with a large cast of characters, featuring government,
police, and army bureaucracies; sex, politics, and news. In 1965, when Rhodesia
declared independence unilaterally (one of the last colonies and not tiny), "I felt
as if the book were coming true as I wrote it."[5]

Jones' books range from amusing slapstick situations to sharp social observation
(Changeover is both), to witty parody of literary forms. Foremost amongst the
latter are The Tough Guide To Fantasyland, and its fictional companion-pieces Dark
Lord of Derkholm (1998) and Year of the Griffin (2000), which provide a merciless
(though not unaffectionate) critique of formulaic sword-and-sorcery epics.[citation
needed]

The Harry Potter books are frequently compared to the works of Diana Wynne Jones.
Many of her earlier children's books were out of print in recent years, but have
now been re-issued for the young audience whose interest in fantasy and reading was
spurred by Harry Potter.[6][7]

Jones' works are also compared to those of Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman. She was
friends with both McKinley[8] and Gaiman, and Jones and Gaiman are fans of each
other's work; she dedicated her 1993 novel Hexwood to him after something he said
in conversation inspired a key part of the plot.[9] Gaiman had already dedicated
his 1991 four-part comic book mini-series The Books of Magic to "four witches", of
whom Jones was one.[10]

For Charmed Life, the first Chrestomanci novel, Jones won the 1978 Guardian
Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award by The Guardian newspaper that
is judged by a panel of children's writers.[11] Three times she was a commended
runner-up[a] for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the
year's best children's book: for Dogsbody (1975), Charmed Life (1977), and the
fourth Chrestomanci book The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988).[12] She won the
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, children's section, in 1996 for The Crown of Dalemark
(concluding that series) and in 1999 for Dark Lord of Derkholm; in four other years
she was a finalist for that annual literary award by the Mythopoeic Society.[13][b]

The 1986 novel Howl's Moving Castle was inspired by a boy at a school she was
visiting, who asked her to write a book called The Moving Castle.[14] It was
published first by Greenwillow in the U.S., where it was a runner-up for the annual
Boston Globe�Horn Book Award in children's fiction.[15] In 2004, Hayao Miyazaki
made the Japanese-language animated movie Howl's Moving Castle, which was nominated
for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.[16] A version dubbed in English
was released in the UK and US in 2005, with the voice of Howl performed by
Christian Bale.[17] Next year Jones and the novel won the annual Phoenix Award from
the Children's Literature Association, recognising the best children's book
published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award (named for mythical
bird phoenix to suggest the book's rise from obscurity).[18]

Fire and Hemlock had been the 2005 Phoenix runner-up.[18] It is a novel based on
Scottish ballads, and was a Mythopoeic Fantasy finalist in its own time.[b]

Archer's Goon (1984) was a runner-up for that year's Horn Book Award.[15] It was
adapted for television in 1992.[19] One Jones fansite believes it to be "the only
tv adaptation (so far) of one of Diana's books".[20]

Jones' book on clich�s in fantasy fiction, The Tough Guide To Fantasyland

(nonfiction), has a cult following among writers and critics, despite being
difficult to find due to an erratic printing history. It was recently reissued in
the UK, and has been reissued in the United States in 2006 by Firebird Books. The
Firebird edition has additional material and a completely new design, including a
new map.[citation needed]

The British Fantasy Society recognized her significant impact on fantasy with its
occasional Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1999.[21][citation needed] She received an
honorary D.Litt from the University of Bristol in July 2006[22] and the World
Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007.[13]

Shortly after her death in March 2011, it was reported that Earwig and the Witch
and a collection of Jones' articles would be published later[23] � as they were in
June 2011 and September 2012. The story in progress when she became too ill to
write was completed by her sister Ursula Jones: The Islands of Chaldea
(HarperCollins, 2014).[24]

Interviewed by The Guardian in June 2013, after she finished the Chaldea story,
Ursula Jones said that "other things were coming to light ... She left behind a
mass of stuff."[24]

In August 2014, Google commemorated Jones with a Google Doodle created by Google
artist Sophie Diao.

Illness and death

Jones was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early summer of 2009.[25] She underwent
surgery in July and reported to friends that the procedure had been successful.[26]
However, in June 2010 she announced that she would be discontinuing chemotherapy
because it only made her feel ill. In mid-2010 she was halfway through a new book
with plans for another to follow.[27] She died on 26 March 2011 from the disease.
[1] She was surrounded by her husband, three sons, and five grandchildren as she
was cremated at Canford Cemetery. She was loved by many for her passion for
writing.