Dickinson won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for both Tulku (1979) and City of Gold (1980), each being recognised as the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject.

[5][6] Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), the second of the four sons of a man in the colonial service and a farmer's daughter.

As a child he loved stories about knights in armour and explorers, such as Ivanhoe and King Solomon's Mines, and read "anything by Kipling", who influenced his writing greatly.

His father died suddenly but Dickinson entered Saint Ronan's prep school in 1936 with support from the family.

She said in 2009 that she cannot judge the literary work of people she likes personally, but: "Fortunately I had been passionately devoted to his books years before I met him so I can merely go on thinking they're wonderful and he's brilliant now.

"[8] Dickinson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours.

One of his few other books was the collection Chance, Luck and Destiny (1975), which he calls "prose and verse, fact and fiction, on the themes of the title".

Dickinson's first two mysteries both won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger, Skin Deep in 1968 and A Pride of Heroes in 1969.

[16] For Tulku (1979) he won both the Whitbread Children's Book Award and finally the Carnegie Medal[2] after being a commended runner-up three times.

His last works were Earth and Air (Small Beer Press, 2012), and In the Palace of the Khans (Peter Dickinson Books, 2012).

The former continues the "Tales of Elemental Spirits" whose first two volumes Water and Fire comprise stories by both Dickinson and Robin McKinley.