Jones was born in London, the daughter of Marjorie (née Jackson) and Richard Aneurin Jones, both of whom were teachers.[6] When war was announced, shortly after her fifth birthday, she was evacuated to Pontarddulais in Wales where her grandfather was a minister at a chapel. She did not live long in Wales due to a family dispute,[7] 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.[6] 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.
"He spread his arms and language rolled from him, sonorous, magnificent, and rhythmic.. for years after that, I used to dream regularly that a piece of my bedroom wall slid aside revealing my grandfather declaiming in Welsh, and I knew he was declaiming about my sins. At the bottom of my mind there is always a flow of spoken language that is not English, rolling in majestic paragraphs and resounding with splendid polysyllables. I listen to it like
music when I write."
- An excerpt from her autobiography detailing her time at Wales with her grandfather.
Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections on the magic of writing – Random House, 2012.[9]
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.[10] 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."[10]Changeover is set in a fictional African colony during transition, and what 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."[10]
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.[11][12]
Jones's works are also compared to those of Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman. She was friends with both McKinley[13] 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.[14] Gaiman had already dedicated his 1991 four-part comic book mini-series The Books of Magic to "four witches", of whom Jones was one.[15]
Fire and Hemlock had been the 2005 Phoenix runner-up.[23] 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.[20] It was adapted for television in 1992.[24] One Jones fansite believes it to be "the only tv adaptation (so far) of one of Diana's books".[25]
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.[26]
Jones was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early summer of 2009.[30] She underwent surgery in July and reported to friends that the procedure had been successful.[31] 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.[32] She died on 26 March 2011 from the disease.[1]
The story in progress when she became too ill to write, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed by her sister Ursula Jones in 2014.[33]
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."[33] In 2013 another book was published posthumously, Vile Visitors.
^Today there are usually eight books on the Carnegie shortlist.
According to CCSU, some runners-up through 2002 were Commended (from 1955) or Highly Commended (from 1966); the latter distinction became approximately annual in 1979. There were about 160 commendations of both kinds in 48 years including two for 1975, three for 1977, and six for 1988.
^ abFire and Hemlock was one of six finalists for the Mythopoeic Award in 1986, when there was a single Fantasy award, and Jones was five times one of four or five finalists in the Children's category after dual fiction awards were introduced in 1992.
^Parsons, Caron (27 March 2003). "Wrestling with an angel". Going Out in Bristol. BBC. Archived from the original on 24 October 2013. Retrieved 3 June 2013.
^McKinley, Robin (23 September 2010). "fame. sort of". Robin McKinley: Days in the Life* *with footnotes. Robinmckinleysblog.com. Archived from the original on 16 November 2017. Retrieved 16 August 2014.
^Gaiman, Neil [date unknown]. [Title unknown]. The Magian Line 2.2. Refrain: "But I've got a copy of Hexwood, dedicated to me by Diana Wynne Jones". Hexwood was published in 1993. ReprintArchived 9 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine as "Neil's Thankyou pome" at Chrestomanci Castle retrieved 2014-12-18.
^Gaiman, Neil (13 March 2003). "untitled". Neil Gaiman's Journal. Neil Gaiman (journal.neilgaiman.com). Archived from the original on 25 March 2019. Retrieved 16 August 2014.
^Gaiman, Neil (23 July 2009). "Eleven Days or Thereabouts". Neil Gaiman's Journal. Neil Gaiman (journal.neilgaiman.com). Archived from the original on 25 March 2019. Retrieved 16 August 2014.
^"Ansible 275". News.ansible.co.uk. 11 June 2010. Archived from the original on 1 July 2014. Retrieved 15 August 2014.
Rosenberg, Teya; Hixon, Martha P.; Scapple, Sharon M., eds. (2002). Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN0-8204-5687-X.
