Joan Delano Aiken MBE (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels.

Their mother, Canadian-born Jessie MacDonald (1889–1970), was a Master's graduate from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Aiken was taught at home by her mother until the age of twelve and from 1936 to 1940 at Wychwood School for girls in North Oxford.

After her husband's death, Aiken joined the magazine Argosy, where she worked in various editorial capacities and, she later said, learned her trade as a writer.

[1] Aiken produced more than 100 books, including more than a dozen collections of fantasy stories, plays and poems, and modern and historical novels for adults and children.

Many of Aiken's most popular books, including the Wolves Chronicles[7] (also known as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series or the James III series), are set in an elaborate alternative history of Britain in which James II was never deposed in the Glorious Revolution, but supporters of the House of Hanover continually agitate against the monarchy.

Pieńkowski won the foremost British award for children's book illustration, the Greenaway Medal, for The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape, 1971), a collection of "unique fairy tales from Eastern Europe and Russia" retold by Aiken.

Two of Joan Aiken's stories from her 1968 collection A Necklace of Raindrops were adapted into animated short films by director Tatyana Mititella at Soyuzmultfilm studio in the Soviet Union: The Wolves Chronicles vary in length from less than 150 pages to more than 250 pages.

Blastburn, the fictional setting of this work, features as the location of Mrs. Brisket's orphanage in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but does not otherwise bring elements of the other books.

"Joan Aiken follows all the conventions of Dickensian fiction with just a little extra to satisfy jaded contemporary tastes.