Jan Mark

She was born Janet Brisland in 1943 and educated at Ashford Grammar School in Kent. After four years at Canterbury College of Art, whence she emerged with a national diploma in design in 1965, she went on to teach English and Art at Southfields School, Gravesend. She had, though, been a writer for as long as she could remember (winning second prize in a Daily Mirror competition for children when she was 15) and as a teacher she achieved local fame through writing comedies “with lots of fights”. She later wrote and published several plays for television.

In 1969 she had married Neil Mark and it was after their move to Norfolk, close to the RAF base at Coltishall, that she wrote Thunder and Lightnings. The story was less one of events than of place and character. Andrew and his family (like the Marks) arrive as incomers from Kent to Pallingham. Andrew forms a friendship with the apparently backward Victor, who is, however, wise in the deficiencies of this world and an immense authority on aircraft. Victor is saddened at the imminent replacement of his favourite Lightnings by Jaguars. (“Everything go . . . everything go that you like best. That never come back”.)

The book was flawless: perceptive and often very funny in its portrayal of the figures in its landscape, accurate in its conversational interchanges, whether between parents, teachers and children or the new arrivals from Kent and the locals with their Norfolk burr. Above all, it was sensitive to the dramatic potential of simply recording the interplay of characters, drawing the reader into the lives on the page. That gift of sympathetic insight was to dominate many of the 80 or so books of Jan Mark’s varied oeuvre.

There was little variation in Under the Autumn Garden (1977), the successor to Lightnings — and a book which may incidentally stand token of its author’s love of gardening, with plant names cropping up all over. But forebodings of a series-manufacturer at work were smartly dispelled by what followed: The Ennead (1978) and Divide and Rule (1979) which, along with Aquarius (1982), have proved her most controversial works.

All three are substantial novels set in non-existent places at undefined times, exploring the pressures brought to bear on the non-conforming individual. Published under the Kestrel imprint, they were rightly offered as books “not confined to child readers” for whom, at that time, the claustrophobia of their imagined societies and their drift towards tragedy might be seen as challenging. They were, however, written with a controlled power and they confirmed Mark’s commitment to an untrammelled observation of human motives and behaviour.

With that established, she seems to have felt free to return to subjects that made fewer (and more cheerfully acceptable) demands on her readers, although, in recent years, novels such as The Eclipse of the Century (1999) and Riding Tycho (2005) have shown that she had not lost her capacity to handle complex and powerful themes.

Dedicated absolutely to her craft — almost living to write — she gained that status, rare among authors as prolific as she, of working to no formula and allowing every story to find its own mode of expression. Although she may be best known for her longer tales such as Handles (1983), one of her many sympathetic portrayals, laced with delicious similes, on an unusual child adjusting to adverse circumstances (also a winner of the Carnegie Medal) she was a mistress of the short story too. There her ever-present gift for comedy is seen at its best, its satiric edge sharpened against many a hapless parent, aunt or teacher.

Responding, perhaps, to a suggestion that she might attempt changes in narrative technique, she wrote two hilarious stories that did just that: Finders Losers (1990), a kind of juvenile La Ronde, in which only the reader knows the interconnections that make up a day in the life of six characters, and They Do Things Differently There (1994), a satire positing double dimensions in time.

For younger children, she was completely at home both with those approachable tales that it was fashionable to commission for “beginning readers”, and with picture books, where she was keenly aware of the need to adjust the rhythms of the story to the sequencing of the pictures. Her first collaboration was with Antony Maitland over a story deriving from Gorky about a village filling up with devil-cats, Out of the Oven (1986). She went on to work with several leading picture-book artists of the day.

Of particular note was The Tale of Tobias, illustrated by Rachel Merriman (1993), a retelling — by the hero’s dog — of the story of Tobias and the Angel from the Apocrypha. It signals Mark’s not uncritical interest in the nature of religion, which can be found below the surface of several of her tales of contemporary life and which is central to her version of the Torah, God’s Story (1995), strongly told, and strongly illustrated by David Parkins.

Within this prodigious storytelling career, Jan Mark found time to engage directly with her youthful readers and with professional colleagues. Her experience as a teacher had already sharpened her awareness of the neglect of adventurous reading strategies in schools and the dismal lack of esteem in which children’s writers were held (unless, of course, they were capable of banking a million a year).

She was for three years writer-in-residence at the Oxford Polytechnic, she was a constant visitor to schools and libraries and she joined battle in the press against those Ennead-ish spirits who sought to regulate what may or may not be written for children.

She was also responsible, through her editing of The Oxford Book of Children’s Stories (1993), for bringing a much-needed fresh assessment to the place of the children’s writer in history.

In her wide-ranging Patrick Hardy Lecture on the editorial demands of that work, printed in Signal; Approaches to Children’s Books no. 73, January 1994, she regretted the speed with which writing, even of the recent past, came to be misunderstood by critics reading it outside the context of its own times. It was “short-sighted”, she said, for “we all date”. One must hope that her prophecy — that eventually “myself and my colleagues will be regarded with the same horror, dismay and derision . . . as is now accorded to our colleagues in the past” — will remain unfulfilled. If that happens, the world will surely have lost its sense of humour.

Mark’s marriage was dissolved in 1989. She is survived by a son and a daughter. In 2005 she donated her manuscripts and working papers to Seven Stories, the centre for children’s books at Newcastle upon Tyne.

Jan Mark, writer for children, was born on June 22, 1943. She died on January 16, 2006, aged 62.