Jan mark

Jan Mark (22 June 1943 – 16 January 2006) was a British writer best known for children's books.
Jan Mark (1943-2006) was a much-respected, award-winning author of books for readers of all ages.
Jan Mark was a British writer best known for children's books.

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Jan Mark

English writer (1943–2006)

Jan Mark (22 June 1943 – 16 January 2006) was a British writer best known for children's books. In all she wrote over fifty novels and plays and many anthologised short stories. She won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject, both for Thunder and Lightnings (1976) and for Handles (1983).^[1]^[2] She was also a "Highly Commended" runner up for Nothing To Be Afraid Of (1980).

Life

Janet Marjorie Brisland was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire and was raised and educated in Ashford in Kent.^[3] She was a secondary school teacher between 1965 and 1971 and became a full-time writer in 1974. She was married once and divorced, and was survived by her daughter Isobel and son Alex.

Mark is known for acutely observed short stories that are concise and show an imaginative use of language.^[4] She also wrote novels about seemingly ordinary children in contemporary settings, such as Thunder and Lightnings, as

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Janet Marjorie Brisland was born on 22 June 1943 in Welwyn Garden City, though her family home was in Kent. At the age of 15, she was a runner-up in a Daily Mirror short story competition. Several of her childhood pieces of writing survive – mainly libretto and plays.

After studying for a National Art Diploma at Canterbury College of Art she began working as an English and Art teacher in Gravesend. During this time, she married Neil Mark and their daughter, Isobel, was born. In 1971 the family relocated from Kent to the Norfolk village of Ingham, following Neil’s appointment as a computer operator.

In 1974, their son, Alex, was born, and Jan wrote Thunder and Lightnings in response to the Guardian/Kestrel competition to find new contemporary writers of children’s fiction. Upon winning in 1975, Jan embarked on a career as a full-time writer, spending eight hours a day generating a backlist.

From 1982 to 1984 she was Writer in Residence at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) and moved permanent to Oxford in 1986. From there, she travel

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Remembering Jan Mark

Perhaps you expect me to say that, on reading Thunder and Lightnings, I wrote forthwith to the author and she invited me to meet her, and so a wonderful friendship began. But of course that didn't happen. After twelve months or so in England and Greece, I returned to Australia, where I re-wrote my own first book and a few others. Over the years, however, I read every book I could find by Jan Mark.

These included Under the Autumn Garden (1977), which followed in the realist tradition of the author's first book, and then the speculative fiction of The Ennead (1978) and Divide and Rule (1979). As well as the stready stream of novels, there were short stories in anthologies such as Nothing to be Afraid of (1981) and Feet (1983). Rather than seeing stories as some kind of makeweight mode, Jan Mark maintained that she preferred writing them. (Her understanding of this challenging genre would later be put to good use, when she was invited to edit The Oxford Book of Children's Stories.)

If Mark's reputation