Joan Aiken - Biography

Biography

Aiken was born in Mermaid Street in Rye, East Sussex on 4 September 1924. Her father was the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken (1889-1973). Her older brother was writer John Aiken (1913-1990) and her older sister was writer Jane Aiken Hodge (1917-2009). Joan's mother, Canadian-born Jessie MacDonald (1889-1970), was a Masters graduate from Radcliffe College, USA. Jessie and Conrad's marriage was dissolved in 1929, and Jessie married English writer Martin Armstrong in 1930. Conrad Aiken went on to marry twice more. Together with her brother John and her sister Jane, Joan Aiken authored Conrad Aiken Remembered (1989), a short, subtle appreciation of their complex and difficult father.

Joan Aiken was taught at home by her mother until the age of twelve, before going on to attend Wychwood School, Oxford, between 1936 and 1940; she did not go on to university. She had written stories from an early age, finishing her first full length novel when she was sixteen and having her first short story for adults accepted for publication when she was seventeen. In 1941 her first children's story was broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour.

Aiken worked for the United Nations Information Office in London from 1943 to 1949. In 1945 she married Ronald George Brown, a journalist also working for the United Nations Information Office, and they had two children; he died in 1955. After her husband's death she joined the magazine Argosy where she worked in various editorial capacities, and said she learned her trade as a writer. The magazine was one of many in which she published short stories between 1955 to 1960. 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 to be published as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase in 1962. By this time she was able to write full time from home, producing two or three books a year for the rest of her life, mainly children's books and thrillers, but also many articles, introductions and talks on children's literature, and on the work of Jane Austen.

She married New York landscape painter and teacher Julius Goldstein in 1976; they divided their time between her home, The Hermitage in Petworth, West Sussex, and New York. He died in 2001.

Joan Aiken died at home at the age of 79, after a fall. She was survived by her two children.