Diana Wynne Jones (16 August 1934 – 26 March 2011) Her work has been nominated for several awards. She was twice a finalist for the Hugo Award, nominated fourteen times for the Locus Award, seven times for the Mythopoeic Award (which she won twice), twice for a British Fantasy Award (won in 1999), and twice for a World Fantasy Award, which she won in 2007.
Early life and marriage
Jones was born in London, the daughter of Marjorie (née Jackson) and Richard Aneurin Jones, both of whom were teachers. and thereafter moved several times, including periods in the Lake District, in York, and back to London. In 1943 her family finally settled in Thaxted, Essex, where her parents worked running an educational conference centre. 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 Friends' School, Saffron Walden, she studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien before graduating in 1956. In the same year she married John Burrow, a scholar of medieval literature, with whom she had three sons. After a brief period in London, in 1957 the couple returned to Oxford, where they stayed until moving to Bristol in 1976.
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Jones started writing during 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 felt harried by the crises of adults in the household: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a sister, and a friend with daughter.
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.
Jones's works are also compared to those of Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman. She was friends with both McKinley and Gaiman, and Jones and Gaiman were 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. Gaiman had already dedicated his 1991 four-part comic book mini-series The Books of Magic to "four witches", of whom Jones was one.
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. 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. A version dubbed in English was released in the UK and US in 2005, with the voice of Howl performed by Christian Bale. 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). One Jones fansite believes it to be "the only tv adaptation (so far) of one of Diana's books".
Jones's book on clichés in fantasy fiction, The Tough Guide To Fantasyland (nonfiction), has a cult following among writers and critics, despite initially being difficult to find due to an erratic printing history. It was 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.
The British Fantasy Society recognised her significant impact on fantasy with its Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1999. She received an honorary D.Litt from the University of Bristol in July 2006 and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007.
Illness and death
Jones was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early summer of 2009. She underwent surgery in July and reported to friends that the procedure had been successful. However, in June 2010 she announced that she would be discontinuing chemotherapy because it only made her feel ill. She died on 26 March 2011 from the disease.
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| 1986
| Mythopoeic Society
| Mythopoeic Awards, Fantasy Award
| Fire and Hemlock
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| 1992
| Mythopoeic Society
| Mythopoeic Awards, Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
| Castle in the Air
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| 1996
| Mythopoeic Society
| Mythopoeic Awards, Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
| The Crown of Dalemark
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| 1997
| Worldcon
| Hugo Award, Hugo Award for Best Related Work
| The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
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| 1997
| Locus
| Locus Award, Best Non-fiction
| The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
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| 1997
| World Fantasy Convention
| World Fantasy Award, Special Award—Professional
| The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
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| 1999
| British Fantasy Society
| British Fantasy Award, Karl Edward Wagner Award
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| 1999
| Mythopoeic Society
| Mythopoeic Awards, Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
| Dark Lord of Derkholm
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| 2004
| Locus
| Locus Award, Best Young Adult Book
| The Merlin Conspiracy
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| 2007
| Mythopoeic Society
| Mythopoeic Awards, Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
| The Pinhoe Egg
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| 2007
| World Fantasy Convention
| World Fantasy Award, Life Achievement
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| 2009
| Mythopoeic Society
| Mythopoeic Awards, Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
| House of Many Ways
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| 2011
| Locus
| Locus Award, Best Young Adult Book
| Enchanted Glass
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| 2013
| British Fantasy Society
| British Fantasy Award, Best Non-Fiction
| Reflections: On the Magic of Writing
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| 2015
| Mythopoeic Society
| Mythopoeic Awards, Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
| The Islands of Chaldea
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Explanatory notes
References
Citations
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Additional works cited
- Formerly The Official Diana Wynne Jones Fansite.
Further reading
External links
- The Diana Wynne Jones fansite—fan-operated but approved by Jones who also participated
- "Diana Wynne Jones", entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
- Diana Wynne Jones at SciFan
- "Wrestling with an Angel" (2003), based on an interview with BBC Bristol