Marcus Sedgwick
Author who won awards for his dark fiction for young adults
MARCUS SEDGWICK, who has died unexpectedly aged 54, was a prolific prizewinning author of beautifully written and darkly gripping stories with an underlying moral core.
A gentle, funny man, bursting with original ideas, Sedgwick wrote mainly for older children and young adults, and his books were shortlisted for around 40 major awards.
He won the Branford Boase award, the first of several prizes, for his debut novel, Floodland (2000), a dystopian yarn of a Norfolk turned by global warming into an unfriendly ocean dotted with small islands. His gothic fantasy My Swordhand is Singing (2006), set in the snowy forests of 17th-century Romania and drawing on the vampire legends of eastern Europe, won the Booktrust Teenage Prize.
Sedgwick also became the most-nominated author for the Michael L Printz Award of the American Library Association for excellence in literature written for young adults, winning three times, for Revolver (2011), The Ghosts of Heaven (2015,a compilation of four stories) and Midwinterblood (2016).
Reviewing the second of these titles for The Daily Telegraph, Martin Chilton wrote: “What makes this book something special is that, as a whole, it is ... a beguiling and philosophical account of human longing and the unknown. A triumph.”
Many of Sedgwick’s books featured snowy landscapes, inspired by the winter snowscapes of his childhood in Kent. He spent many holidays in icy northern climes, and in Snow (2016), a book for adults featured as Book of the Week on Radio Four, he explored the science of snow and its place in our culture.
Marcus Sedgwick was born on April 8 1968 at Preston, a small village in east Kent, and as he recalled in a 2011 article in The Times, his first memory was of being wheeled in his pushchair through the village graveyard.
Within a few years he was devouring gothic thrillers and books of mystery, magic and myth; a favourite was Susan Cooper’s 1973 children’s fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising: “More than anything else it was the imagery, the atmosphere of a sinister and snowy English winter, that grabbed me,” he recalled.
Told it would be impossible to make a living as an author, he read Mathematics and Politics at university. Before proving his advisers wrong, he worked as a bookseller and for a children’s book publisher.
He wrote more than 40 books, some of which he illustrated himself, some co-authored with his brother Julian. They include the Raven Mysteries series for children aged eight and above, charting the adventures of the Otherhand family of Castle Otherhand and their faithful guardian, Edgar the raven.
For many years Sedgwick lived in West Sussex where, in addition to writing, he played the drums in the Brighton-based band, Garrett.
Later he moved to a chalet in the French Alps – at “more or less the height of Mount Snowdon, though with more snow” – partly in the hope of recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome, which he believed he had contracted on a trip to Asia in 2013.
In All In Your Head: What Happens When Your Doctor Doesn’t Believe You?,
published earlier this year, Sedgwick delivered a moving but wryly humorous account of his struggle to persuade the medical establishment that there was something physically wrong with him.
His final fantasy for children, Wrath, a novella published in March, returned to the themes that marked his debut Floodland,
with a story of a girl who can hear the Earth in distress and goes missing. Earlier this month it featured in a Sunday Times list of Best Children’s Books of 2022.
At the time of his death Marcus Sedgwick was living in the south of France.
He was separated from his second wife and is survived by a daughter.
Marcus Sedgwick, born April 8 1968, died November 15 2022