Fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones was born in London on 16 August 1934. She wrote more than 40 books, including Howl’s Moving Castle and the Chrestomanci series, but books were scarce during her childhood.

Jones was five when the Second World War began. Her family moved several times before settling in Thaxted, Essex. She later described her parents as neglectful and recalled that her father restricted his daughters’ access to books. Jones began writing stories for herself and her two younger sisters and said that by the age of eight she knew she wanted to become a writer.

She studied English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were among her lecturers. Jones developed her own approach to fantasy, often questioning its familiar rules rather than following them.

She began her professional writing with plays in the 1960s. Her first children’s novel, Wilkins’ Tooth, was published in 1973. Charmed Life, published in 1977, became the first of the Chrestomanci novels, while Howl’s Moving Castle appeared in 1986.

Jones’s books often presented adults as mistaken, selfish or unreliable rather than automatic sources of wisdom. She also played with standard fantasy assumptions, an approach she later turned directly on the genre in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Howl’s Moving Castle reached a wider international audience when Hayao Miyazaki adapted it as an animated film in 2004. Jones continued writing until late in her life and died in Bristol in 2011.