Diana wynne jones autobiography of miss

I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old. In late August 1939, on a blistering hot day, my father loaded me and my three-year-old sister, Isobel, into a friend’s car and drove to my grandparents’ manse in Wales.

"There’s going to be a war," he explained. He went straight back to London, where my mother was expecting her third baby any day.

Diana wrote both children's books and plays (mostly performed at the London Arts Theatre) and her first book was published in Since then she wrote over.

Diana wrote both children's books and plays (mostly performed at the London Arts Theatre) and her first book was published in Since then she wrote over.

Diana Wynne Jones was born in August in London, where she had a chaotic and unsettled childhood against the background of World War II.

Weekdays I was sent to the local school, where everyone was taught in Welsh except me.

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In a career spanning four decades, award-winning author Diana Wynne Jones wrote more than forty books of fantasy for young readers.

We were left in the austere company of Mam and Dad (as we were told to call them). Dad, who was a moderator of the Welsh Nonconformist Chapels, was a stately patriarch; Mam was a small browbeaten lady who seemed to us to have no character at all.

We were told that she was famous in her youth for her copper hair, her wit, and her beauty, but we saw no sign of any of this.

Wales could not have been more different from our new house in Hadley Wood on the outskirts of London.

It was all grey or very green and the houses were close together and dun-coloured. The river ran black with coal – an