Joan Aiken (1924-2004) was an English writer of extraordinary invention and productivity, best remembered for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its sequels, though her complete works run to well over a hundred books.
Born in Rye, Sussex, the daughter of the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken and stepdaughter of the writer Martin Armstrong, she was educated largely at home in a household where writing was simply what people did, and she began composing stories on the family typewriter as a child.
Widowed young with two children, she wrote her way to independence, working at the UN Information Centre and Argosy magazine before fiction could support her.
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962) launched what became known as the Wolves Chronicles, a dozen books set in a gloriously skewed alternate England under the imagined Stuart king James III, where wolves roam the Channel Tunnel and Hanoverian plotters scheme, following heroines like the resourceful Dido Twite.
She wrote gothic thrillers for adults, Jane Austen continuations, supernatural stories, and some of the finest short story collections for children in the language, and won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.
She was appointed MBE for services to children's literature in 1999, and wrote, by her own account, every day of her life.
