John Marsden

John Marsden (27 September 1950 – 18 December 2024) was an Australian writer and teacher. He wrote more than 40 books in his career, including his young adult novel Tomorrow, When the War Began, which began a series of seven books.

Marsden began writing for children while working as a teacher, and had his first book, So Much to Tell You, published in 1987. In 2006, he started an alternative school, Candlebark School, and reduced his writing to focus on teaching and running the school. In 2016, he opened the arts-focused secondary school, Alice Miller School. Both schools are in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria.

Early life and education

John Marsden was born on 27 September 1950 in Melbourne, the son of Eustace Culham Hudson Marsden and Jeanne Lawler Marsden. He had two older siblings. Robin and Andrew (Sam) and a younger sibling, Rosalind. He spent the first 10 years of his life living in the country towns of Kyneton and Devonport, Tasmania. He was a great-great-great-great nephew of colonial Anglican clergyman and magistrate Samuel Marsden.

When Marsden was 10 years old, he moved to Sydney and attended The King's School, Parramatta. He was accepted into the University of Sydney to study a double degree in law and arts, but eventually dropped out. He worked at different jobs, including an abattoir, working in a mortuary, delivering pizzas, working as a motorbike courier, working as a nightwatchman, selling encyclopaedias, and working with chickens.

Career

Early career

While working at Geelong Grammar School's Timbertop campus as an English teacher, Marsden made the decision to write for teenagers, following his dissatisfaction with his students' apathy towards reading, or the observation that teenagers simply were not reading anymore. Marsden then wrote So Much to Tell You in only three weeks, and the book was published in 1987. The book sold record numbers and won numerous awards including "Book of the Year" by the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA).

In the five years following the publication of So Much To Tell You, Marsden published six more books. Notable works from this period are Out of Time, which was nominated by the CBCA as a notable book for older readers, and Letters From the Inside and a sequel to So Much to Tell You called Take My Word For It, which were both shortlisted for the CBCA's Children's Book of the Year: Older Readers award. Upon publication in the United States, Letters From the Inside received accolades from The Horn Book Magazine and the American Library Association. American novelist Robert Cormier found the novel "unforgettable" and described Marsden as a "major writer deserving of world-wide acclaim".

Later career

In 1993, Marsden published Tomorrow, When the War Began, the first book in the Tomorrow series and his most acclaimed work. Marsden went on to write seven books in the Tomorrow series, together with a follow-up trilogy, The Ellie Chronicles.

At the same time as writing the Tomorrow series, Marsden wrote several other novels such as Checkers, edited works such as This I Believe, wrote children's picture books such as The Rabbits, poetry such as Prayer for the Twenty-First Century, and non-fiction works such as Everything I Know About Writing and Secret Men's Business. He wrote more than 40 books in his career. His last novel, titled Take Risks, was published in 2021.

Themes

Marsden's earlier works are largely novels aimed at teenage or young adult audience. Common themes in Marsden's works include sexuality, violence in society, survival at school and in a harsh world, and conflict with adult authority figures. However, Marsden also declared that he wished to write about "things that have always been important for humans... [such as] love, for a start. And the absence of love. The way people relate to each other. The way people solve problems. Courage. Spirit. The human spirit."

Pseudonymous novel

In 1994, a sexually explicit adult novel Lost To View, written by Marsden, was published under the pseudonym “James Hordern”. It tells the story of a teenage runaway who becomes a sex worker. Marsden acknowledged that he was the author of this novel in an interview with the Weekend Australian in 2019, saying: "I might as well stop being coy about it … plus you’ll never find it anyway."

Recognition and accolades

In 1996, Marsden's books took the top six places on the Teenage Fiction best-seller lists for Australia. Also in 1996, he was named "Australia's most popular author today in any literary field" by The Australian. In 1997, Australian readers voted three of his books into Australia's 100 most-loved books of all time. His books have also been translated into many languages. As of 1999, his works had been translated into 13 languages, including Norwegian, Afrikaans and Persian.

Marsden won every major writing award in Australia for young people's fiction, including what he described as one of the highlights of his career, the 2006 Lloyd O'Neil Award for contributions to Australian publishing. This award meant that Marsden was one of only five authors to be honoured for lifelong services to the Australian book industry at the time.

He was twice named among Best Books of the Year by the American Library Association and once by Publishers Weekly, was runner-up for Dutch Children's Book of the Year and short-listed for the German Young Readers' Award, won the Grand Jury Prize as Austria's Most Popular Writer for Teenagers, and won the coveted Buxtehude Bull in Germany.

In 2008 he was nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world's largest children's and youth literature award and the second largest literature prize in the world.

In 2014, Lyndon Terracini announced that Opera Australia had co-commissioned her and Kate Miller-Heidke to write an opera based on Marsden's The Rabbits. The work, The Rabbits, premiered in 2015 in Perth, and was staged in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, winning several awards.

In December 2018, Marsden was awarded the Dromkeen Medal, in recognition of his outstanding achievement in children's and young adult literature.