Jan Mark

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Jan Mark (June 22, 1943 - January 16, 2006) was a British author, best known as a writer for children. She was christened Janet Marjorie Brisland in Welwyn Garden City in 1943 and was raised and educated in Kent. She was a secondary school teacher between 1965 and 1971, and became a full-time writer in 1974. She wrote over fifty novels and plays and many anthologized short stories. She was divorced, and is survived by two children.

She won the Carnegie Medal for "Thunder and Lightnings" (1976) and for "Handles" (1983).

She is justly famous for her acutely-observed short stories which do not waste a single word and which show an imaginative use of language. She also wrote novels about seemingly ordinary children in contemporary settings, e.g. Thunder and Lightnings, as well as science fiction novels set in their own universes with their own rules, e.g. The Ennead. Her last works include the young adult novels The Eclipse of the Century and Useful Idiots.

The title of Thunder and Lightnings, a story set in rural Norfolk, is a reference to the British RAF jet fighter the English Electric Lightning and in turn inspired the name of a website of the history of that aeroplane and others of a similar time.[1]

Jan Mark was very popular in Flanders, Belgium, where she participated in an educational project to stimulate teachers of English into using teenage fiction in the classroom. Her Flemish friends devoted a website to her and to her work. [2]