Marcus Sedgwick, who has died suddenly aged 54, was a passionate and intellectually challenging writer of more than 40 books, mostly for children and young adults, each told with creative originality and optimism however apparently dark their theme. He was also an encouraging, stimulating and generous teacher of creative writing.
His stories were demanding and robust, substantial and accessible. He had a vivid imagination as well as an encyclopedic reading background that, in addition to his original ideas, allowed him to create stories out of stories, often drawing on folklore and mythology. Like many writers for children he always said he wrote for himself and not for any specific audience, or genre, and he occasionally wrote for adults as well. Each book was a thrilling standalone novel that carried much of importance within the depth of the story.
Success came quickly to Marcus. Floodland (2000), a prescient adventure about the chilling effects of climate change, won the Branford Boase award, a then newly established prize for a debut author and the book’s editor.
“Marcus’s writing was striking even in that first novel,” said his editor, Fiona Kennedy. “And he was ahead of his time in writing about climate change just then.” Kennedy, who continued to work with him, watched his career flourish. “He was always bursting with ideas and could create different worlds while keeping his stories very easy to relate to … He had a vast brain as well as all of that creativity.”
Despite his prolific ideas and early success, he was, Kennedy said, “shy and diffident about each new book. ‘I’ve written this thing, is it any good?’ he’d ask.”
Floodland is still in print and read extensively in schools. The Dark Horse (2001) was a runner-up for the Guardian children’s fiction prize and shortlisted for the Blue Peter book award and the Carnegie medal. Marcus continued to write at least one book a year. He won the Booktrust teenage prize for My Swordhand is Singing (2006) and was regularly on the shortlist for every major award for his subsequent titles.
Being shortlisted but never winning a major UK prize caused Marcus a certain amount of disappointment. This was tempered when he won the Michael L Printz prize in the US for Midwinterblood (2014), a powerful story of love and sacrifice.
Marcus’s books were always critically acclaimed, much admired by other writers and popular with readers. They were frequently described as “dark” – and they often were. Marcus believed that “stories are places for our desires and our imaginations to explore the world more freely than they perhaps do in real life”. He was as skilful at high drama, as in Revolver (2009), a taut short novel set in a vividly described frozen landscape about the morality of using a gun in extreme circumstances, as he was at gothic complexity, as in White Crow (2010), a corkscrew of a story about three generations of a family intertwined by a curse.
Marcus never pulled his punches with stories like these, believing that “there is almost nothing you can’t tackle in a teenage novel”. But he was equally able to write sensitive novels that opened readers’ eyes to less well-known difficulties, as in She is Not Invisible (2013), a humorous and dramatic story of a blind teenager’s trip to New York to find her father. Marcus was inspired by meeting a child who was an avid reader and blind. But the inspiration was not enough alone: as with all his books, Marcus researched every detail, including spending time at New College Worcester, a residential school for blind and visually impaired young people.
Later, after his own diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in 2014, Marcus wrote Snowflake, AZ (2019), weaving together the survival of the planet and problems of invisible illnesses.
In addition to his long novels, Marcus wrote two series of shorter books and The Spear of Destiny (2013), a Doctor Who short story comissioned for the 50th anniversary of the travelling Time Lord. He also wrote graphic novels, including Dark Satanic Mills (2013), illustrated by Marc Olivent and John Higgins, with his brother, Julian, with whom he also worked on film projects. Earlier this year he had written a series of brief non-fiction including Be the Change – Be Calm: Rise Up and Don’t Let Anxiety Hold You Back. And last month he published All In Your Head: What Happens When Your Doctor Doesn’t Believe You?, about his fight to have his CFS clinically diagnosed.
Marcus was a hugely popular teacher of creative writing both as author in residence at Bath Spa University (2011-14) and as a tutor on Arvon courses. He was also a wise and generous reviewer of children’s books for the Guardian.
Born in the village of Preston, in east Kent, Marcus said his earliest memories were of being pushed in a pram in a graveyard, which gave rise to his love of dark, haunting stories. Equally important was his love of mountainous and cold countryside, which he frequently used in setting for his books. His mother had worked at the Centre for Alternative Technology, in Machynlleth, and Marcus had frequently visited its surrounding countryside, where Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence of books is set. Marcus always cited these books as his first influence; his passion for them underpinned his view that books for children mattered almost more than anything. Another great influence was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, to which his father, who died when he was 20, introduced him as a teenager.
Painfully shy as a child, he found his years at a grammar school for boys were traumatic. “Violence came from not just the other boys but from the masters too. And though being beaten up or hit with a hockey stick was bad, it was the psychological torture that was worse.” His home life was, he said, “much, much happier. I am lucky to have come from a truly loving family.”
Despite wanting to write from childhood, he opted for a degree in maths and politics at Bath University as a more likely path to earning a living. But neither took hold. Instead, Marcus worked first bookselling, in Heffers Children’s Bookshop, Cambridge, and later in sales for Ragged Bears and Walker Books. He started to write seriously from 1994.
Marcus was an endlessly fascinating companion with a roguish charm and a compelling intensity. As well as books, he had a rich cultural background in music – he was a drummer in two bands and played bass guitar – and art: he did illustrations for several of his books and enjoyed wood engraving and stone carving.
After his diagnosis, hoping that the better climate and a less stressful lifestyle would help, he moved to the French Alps. More recently, he settled in the Dordogne.
Marcus was married and divorced three times. His daughter, Alice, from his first marriage, to Kate Agnew, survives him, as do Julian and his mother.
• Marcus Sedgwick, author, born 8 April 1968; died 15 November 2022
