Diana Wynne Jones

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Diana Wynne Jones, born on August 19, 1934 – March 26, 2011), a British novelist, scholar, literary commentator, and short story writer.

She primarily wrote fantasy and speculative fiction books for children and young adults. The Chrestomanci series, the Dalemark series; Howl's Moving Castle and The Tough Guide To Fantasyland are among her more popular pieces. Multiple fantasy and science fiction writers have been inspired and muse by Margaret McKinley, Stephen Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Penelope Lively, Megan Whalen Turner, J.K. She has been cited as an inspiration and muse for many fantasy and science fiction writers, including Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Penelope Lively, Megan Whalen Turner, J.K.

Rowling and Dina Rabinovitch are twins. Her work has been nominated for various accolades, including twice for the Locus Award, fourteen times for the Mythopoeic Award (which she would also 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 win in 2007. Jones' books often explores the concepts of time travel, parallel, and/or multiple universes.

Her work is often described as fantasy, but some of her science fiction themes and elements of realism are also included in realism.

Early life and marriage

Jones was born in London, the daughter of Marjorie (née Jackson) and Richard Aneurin Jones, both of whom were teachers. When war was declared, she was evacuated to Wales and later moved to London, including periods in the Lake District, in York, and back to London. Her family moved to Thaxted, Essex, where her parents worked operating an educational conference center in 1943. Jones and her two younger sisters Isobel (later Professor Isobel Armstrong, the literary scholar) and Ursula (later an actor and a children's writer) spent a childhood left largely to their own devices.

She studied English at St Anne's College in Oxford, where she took lectures by both C. S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkien before graduating in 1956. Richard, Michael, and Colin were married in the same year by John Burrow, a well-known medieval literature scholar, with whom she had three children. After a brief time in London in 1957, the couple returned to Oxford, where they remained until moving to Bristol in 1976.

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Career

Jones began writing in the mid-1960s "mostly to keep [her] 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. Besides the children, she was worried about adult problems: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a niece, and a friend with a daughter. Changeover, her first book, was a book for adults published by Macmillan in 1970. It came as the British Empire was depleting colonies, and she recalled in 2004 that it had "looked like every month." A changeover is planned in a fictional African colony during transition, and what starts off as a caution about how to "mark changeover" ceremonially is misunderstood to be concerned with the threat of a terrorist named Mark Changeover. It's a farce with a large cast of characters including government, fire, and army bureaucracies; sex, politics, and news. "I felt as if the book were coming true as I wrote it in 1965," Rhodesia declared independence unilaterally (one of the last colonies, not tiny).

Jones' books range from amusing slapstick situations to keen social analysis (Changeover is both), to a witty parody of literary styles. The Tough Guide To Fantasyland and its fictional companion piece Dark Lord of Derkholm were among the last to offer a merciless (though not unaffectionate) critique of formulaic sword-and-sorcery epics.

The Harry Potter books are often compared to Diana Wynne Jones' work. In recent years, many of her earlier children's books were out of print, but they have now been reissued for the young audience whose fascination in fantasy and reading was sparked by Harry Potter.

Jones' works can also be compared to those of Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman. She was a fan of both McKinley and Gaiman, and Jones and Gaiman were avid followers of each other's work; she dedicated her 1993 book Hexwood to him after something she said in conversation inspired a major piece of the plot. Gaiman had already dedicated his 1991 four-part comic book mini-series The Books of Magic to "four witches," of whom Jones was one.

Jones received the 1978 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award by The Guardian newspaper judging a committee of children's writers. She was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal by the Library Association three times, honoring the year's top children's book, Dogsbody (1977), and Christopher Chant's fourth Chrestomanci book The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988). In 1996, she received the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, children's section, and in 1999 for Dark Lord of Derkholm; in four other years, she was a finalist for the annual literary award by the Mythopoeic Society.

Howl's Moving Castle, a 1986 book by a girl at a school she was visiting, inspired by a boy who was begging her to write a book titled The Moving Castle. In the United States, Greenwillow first appeared in the newspaper, where it was runner-up for the annual Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in children's fiction. Hayao Miyazaki produced Howl's Moving Castle, a Japanese-language animated film that was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2004. In 2005, a version dubbed in English was launched in the United Kingdom and the United States, with Christian Bale's voice as the voice of Howl. Jones and the novel received the Children's Literature Association's annual Phoenix Award, recognizing the best children's book out of print twenty years ago that didn't win a major award (named for mystic bird phoenix to hint at the book's return from obscurity).

Fire and Hemlock were the 2005 Phoenix runners-up. It's a novel based on Scottish ballads and it was a finalist in Mythopoeic Fantasy for the first time.

Goon's Goon (1984) was a runner-up for the Horn Book Award in that year. In 1992, it was released on television. According to one Jones fan site, it is "the only tv version (so far) of one of Diana's books."

Despite initially being difficult to find due to an erratic printing history, Jones' book The Tough Guide To Fantasyland (nonfiction) has a cult following among writers and commentators, despite being difficult to find due to an erratic printing history. It was reissued in the United Kingdom and Firebird Books reissued it in the United States in 2006. The Firebird edition features additional information and a completely new look, as well as a new map.

With its Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1999, the British Fantasy Society acknowledged her profound influence on fantasy. In July 2006, she was given an honorary D.Litt from the University of Bristol, as well as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007.

Google launched a Google Doodle created by Google artist Sophie Diao in August 2014.

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