This was to be the first of many migrations, one of which brought her family to Lane Head, a large manor in the author-populated Lake District and former residence of John Ruskin’s secretary, W.G. When the raids of World War II reached London in 1939, the five-year-old girl and her two younger sisters were torn from their suburban life and sent to Wales to live with their grandparents. She was given the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1999 for having made a significant impact on fantasy, received a D.Lit from Bristol University in 2006, and won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention in 2007.īorn just outside London in 1934, Diana Wynne Jones had a childhood that was “very vivid and often very distressing”-one that became the fertile ground where her tremendous imagination took root. The author herself has also been honored with many prestigious awards for the body of her work. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006, and became one of the most financially successful Japanese films in history.

Her work also found commercial success: in 1992 the BBC adapted her novel Archer’s Goon into a six-part miniseries, and her best-selling Howl’s Moving Castle was made into an animated film by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki in 2004. Since then, in addition to being translated into more than twenty languages, her books have earned a wide array of honors-including two Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honors-and appeared on countless best-of-the-year lists.

From the very beginning, Diana Wynne Jones’s books garnered literary accolades: her novel Dogsbody was a runner-up for the 1975 Carnegie Medal, and Charmed Life won the esteemed Guardian children’s fiction prize in 1977.

Characterized by magic, multiple universes, witches and wizards-and a charismatic nine-lived enchanter-her books were filled with unlimited imagination, dazzling plots, and an effervescent sense of humor that earned her legendary status in the world of fantasy. In a career spanning four decades, award-winning author Diana Wynne Jones wrote more than forty books of fantasy for young readers.

House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones