Diana Wynne Jones (16 August 1934 – 26 March 2011)[1] was a British novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, and short story writer.

Jones has been cited as an inspiration and muse for several fantasy and science fiction authors including Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Penelope Lively, Robin McKinley, Dina Rabinovitch, Megan Whalen Turner, J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman, with Gaiman describing her as "quite simply the best writer for children of her generation".

She did not live long in Wales due to a family dispute,[7] and thereafter moved several times, including periods in the Lake District, in York, and back to London.

[8] In the same year she married John Burrow, a prominent scholar of medieval literature, with whom she had three sons, Richard, Michael and Colin.

At the bottom of my mind there is always a flow of spoken language that is not English, rolling in majestic paragraphs and resounding with splendid polysyllables.

Jones started writing during the mid-1960s "mostly to keep [her] sanity", when the youngest of her three children was about two years old and the family lived in a house owned by an Oxford college.

Besides the children, she felt harried by the crises of adults in the household: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a sister, and a friend with daughter.

It originated as the British Empire was divesting colonies; she recalled in 2004 that it had "seemed like every month, we would hear that yet another small island or tiny country had been granted independence.

Many of her earlier children's books were out of print in recent years, but have now been re-issued for the young audience whose interest in fantasy and reading was spurred by Harry Potter.

[22] Next year Jones and the novel won the annual Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association, recognising the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award (named for mythical bird phoenix to suggest the book's rise from obscurity).

[25] Jones's book on clichés in fantasy fiction, The Tough Guide To Fantasyland (nonfiction), has a cult following among writers and critics, despite initially being difficult to find due to an erratic printing history.

[33] Interviewed by The Guardian in June 2013 after she finished the Chaldea story, Ursula Jones said that "other things were coming to light ... She left behind a mass of stuff.