Joan Aiken

Supernatural stories with real menace in them, and children's novels set in an England that history never got round to producing: Aiken worked both registers at once and was good at both. The Wolves Chronicles, which open with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, are the alternate-history sequence, and they run on nineteenth-century melodrama machinery that she plays entirely straight. The joke is never on the genre, which is why children take them seriously.

Her prizes make the same point from the other direction. She won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, judged by a panel of British children's writers, for The Whispering Mountain in 1968, and was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. She also won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1972 for Night Fall, which is a crime prize rather than a children's one. In 1999 she was appointed MBE for services to children's literature.

The short fiction is where the range shows. She wrote fairy tales with the sweetness taken out, ghost stories that refuse to resolve, and a great deal of anthology work, and she also wrote for adults. A reader who only knows the Wolves books tends to be startled by how nasty she is willing to be when the form is short and nobody is expecting a moral.