During this time she also published her first two collections of children's stories and began work on a children's novel, initially titled Bonnie Green, which was later published in 1962 as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. The magazine was one of many in which she published short stories between 19. They had two children before he died in 1955.Īfter her husband's death, Aiken joined the magazine Argosy, where she worked in various editorial capacities and, she later said, learned her trade as a writer. In September 1945 she married Ronald George Brown, a journalist who was also working at UNIC.

Īiken worked for the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) in London between 19. In 1941 her first children's story was broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour.

Writing stories from an early age, she finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen and had her first short story for adults accepted for publication when she was seventeen. Together with her brother John and her sister Jane, Joan Aiken wrote Conrad Aiken Remembered (1989), a short appreciation of their father.Īiken was taught at home by her mother until the age of twelve and from 1936 to 1940 at Wychwood School for girls in North Oxford. Conrad Aiken went on to marry twice more. Jessie and Conrad's marriage was dissolved in 1929, and Jessie married the English writer Martin Armstrong in 1930. Their mother, Canadian-born Jessie MacDonald (1889–1970), was a Master's graduate from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her older brother was the writer and research chemist John Aiken (1913–1990), and her older sister was the writer Jane Aiken Hodge (1917–2009). Her father was the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken (1889–1973). She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.Īiken was born in Mermaid Street in Rye, Sussex, on 4 September 1924.

For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. Joan Delano Aiken MBE (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels.

Mortimer's Tie by Joan Aiken