Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones was a British author who spent over four decades writing some of the most inventive fantasy fiction published for young readers, prized as much by adults as by children for prose that was witty, structurally daring, and never condescending. She's best known for Howl's Moving Castle (1986), about a young woman transformed into an old crone by a witch's curse who moves into a wizard's magical walking castle and finds a way to break her own spell -- adapted into the Studio Ghibli film by Hayao Miyazaki, which introduced her to a huge new international audience. Her longest-running work is the seven-book Chrestomanci series, set across a multiverse of parallel worlds overseen by an enchanter with nine lives, and she also wrote the four-book Dalemark Quartet and dozens of acclaimed standalone novels including Fire and Hemlock, Dogsbody and Archer's Goon. Jones's plots are known for withholding information as a structural device -- worlds, family relationships and magic systems that only make full sense once the book's final chapters recontextualize everything that came before -- and for heroines and heroes who are stubborn, difficult and never simply likeable, a deliberate rejection of the well-behaved child-protagonist template. She taught and mentored other fantasy writers, and her influence is widely cited by later authors including Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling. New readers most often start with Howl's Moving Castle or Charmed Life, the first Chrestomanci novel published. Jones died in 2011; her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed from her notes by her sister Ursula Jones and published posthumously in 2014.