Diana Wynne Jones Books In Order

Publication Order of Dalemark Books

Publication Order of MagicQuest Books

Publication Order of Chrestomanci Books

Publication Order of Chrestomanci Collections

Publication Order of Howl’s Castle Books

Publication Order of Magids Books

Publication Order of Derkholm Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Publication Order of Picture Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Diana Wynne Jones was an author who was born in London, England, in the 1934. She was born to Richard Aneurin and Marjorie Jones who both were teachers by profession. She lived in London until war was declared in 1939 where her and her family fled to Wales. Her childhood was rather chaotic and negatively impacted by the war as her family could not stay in one place for very long. They spent brief stints in York, Coniston Water and even back in London, always relocating. Eventually they settled in a place named Thaxted, Essex in the 1943.

Her parents started working in an educational conference centre in Essex once they had set up home there. While her parents worked, Jones and her two sisters, well known literary critic Isobel Armstrong and and actress and writer Ursula Jones, were mostly left to themselves. They were left devoid of much reading material by their father who was described as someone who could “beat Scrooge in a meanness contest.” At even a young age, she had a vivid imagination suited with a career as a writer which she channelled into making stories for herself to make up for the lack of books she had to read. However her desire to be a writer was never supported by her parents who simply laughed at her as she was extremely dyslexic.. However, by the time she was fourteen, she had two epic length stories written between twenty copy books.

She went to school in Friends School, a Quaker independent school in Saffron Walden, Essex. After finishing schooling there, she attended St Anne’s College in Oxford, where she studied English. There she was able to attend the lectures of famous writers such as C. S. Lewis, author of “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings series which further inspired her love for language and writing.

When she graduated from college in 1956, she got married to a man named John Burrow in the same year. He worked as a scholar of medieval literature. Together they had three sons named Richard, Michael and Colin and they lived together in London until they moved back to Oxford in 1957. When their youngest child was two years old in the mid 1960s, Jones decided to start writing. She claimed it was “mostly to keep (her) sanity” whilst raising the children, dealing with her sick husband, and being encapsulated in the other assorted crises throughout their household.

Her first book, Changeover, was about a fictional African country transitioning from functioning as a colony to as an independant country. The story is a large mass of characters from all walks of life in the conflict: government, police, and army bureaucracies. It deals with themes related to sex, politics and news. It was aimed at an adult audience and was published by Macmillan in 1970, a time where many colonies had split from under the rule of the British Empire.

Her books varied greatly in genre from slapstick situational comedy to critical political as well as social commentary. Her books for children were often compared to the later Harry Potter series by well loved author JK is Rowling. Even when some of Jone’s books were out of print, the popularity of the Harry Potter series brought them back into popularity. Her works were often compared to the works of famous authors Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman too. Gaiman even dedicated a witch in his book The Books of Magic to her.

One of her most famous books was probably Howl’s Moving Castle. The story took form after a boy, whose name she had forgotten, in a school she was visiting asked her to write a book about a castle that moved. It was published in 1986 by Greenwillow Books of New York in the United States. It was a runner up for the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and in 2005 it won the Phoenix Award after the feature length film had been released.

Howl’s Moving Castle was probably more famous as the feature length, Japanese language movie it was adapted into by Hayao Miyazaki, famous director with Studio Ghibli. The film was released in 2004 and broke box office records in Japan when it was released. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was subsequently dubbed in English and various other European languages.

The book told the story of a young woman named Sophie Hatter living in the fictional town of Market Chipping in the magical kingdom of Ingary. She becomes acquainted with a wizard named Howl and they go on amazing and convoluted adventures together until they eventually settle down as husband and wife. The book became part of a series and subsequent books titled Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways were published in 1990 and 2008 respectively as this actually happened.

She has been the winner of many prestigious awards in her time. These include the Guardian Prize in 1978; the Mythopoeic Award in 1996 and in 1999; and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007. She was also nominated and a runner up for countless awards. She was a runner up for the Children’s Book Award in 1981 and was a runner up for the prestigious Carnegie Medal twice. In 1999 alone she won two major fantasy awards,the awards were as follows; the children’s Mythopoeic Award in the United States as well as the Karl Edward Wagner Award in the United Kingdom. The latter is only awarded to authors believed to have made a large cultural impact on fantasy fiction writing.

In the early summer of 2009, Jones was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was able to undergo the necessary surgery that summer and believed it to be successful. However in 2010 she accepted that the harsh chemotherapy she had to undergo was making her too ill for it to continue. She died on the 26th of March, 2011, leaving behind her husband, three sons, five grandchildren and a legacy in her published novels that will last for generations.While Diana Jones may no longer be with us, her novels have created a cultural impact that will stay with the fantasy genre for decades to come.

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