Aidan Chambers

Aidan Chambers (27 December 1934 – 11 May 2025) was a British author of children's and young-adult novels. He won both the British Carnegie Medal After two years in the Royal Navy as part of his national service, Chambers trained as a teacher and taught for three years at Westcliff High School in Southend-on-Sea before joining an Anglican monastery in Stroud, Gloucestershire in 1960. His young-adult novel Now I Know is based partly on his experiences as a monk.

His first plays, including Johnny Salter (1966), The Car and The Chicken Run (1968), were published while he was a teacher at Archway School in Stroud.

Chambers left the monastery in 1967 and became a freelance writer a year later. His works include the "Dance sequence" of six novels (1978 to 2005): Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, Now I Know, The Toll Bridge, Postcards from No Man's Land and This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn. He and his wife, Nancy, founded Thimble Press and the magazine Signal to promote literature for children and young adults. They were awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Award for outstanding services to children's books in 1982. From 2003 until 2006, he was the president of the School Library Association.

Chambers died after a short illness on 11 May 2025, at the age of 90.

Awards and honours Chambers won two major annual book awards for Postcards from No Man's Land, published by The Bodley Head in 1999, one being the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. 2010 National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) Award for Lifetime Services to English Education 2011 Honorary Doctorate of Literature from Oxford Brookes University

Books Novels for young adults Cycle Smash (1967) Marle (1968) Snake River (1975) Breaktime (1978) Dance on My Grave (1982) Now I Know (1987) The Toll Bridge (1992) Postcards from No Man's Land (1999) This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn (2005) Dying to Know You (2012)

Novels for children Seal Secret (1980) The Present Takers (1984) Chambers also compiled and edited many other children's books, several concerning ghosts. He edited Ghosts Four under the pseudonym Malcolm Blacklin.

Short stories The Kissing Game: Short Stories of Defiance and Flash Fictions (2011)

Criticism and education The Reluctant Reader (1969) Introducing Books to Children (1973, 1983) Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children (1985) The Reading Environment (1991) Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk (1993) Reading Talk (2001) Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk with The Reading Environment (2011) The Age Between: Personal Reflections on Youth Fiction, Fincham Press (2020)