Marcus Sedgwick

Marcus Sedgwick became the most nominated writer in the history of the Michael L. Printz Award, the American prize for young adult fiction: Midwinterblood won it in 2014, while Revolver in 2011 and The Ghosts of Heaven in 2016 were named honour books. Born in Kent in 1968, he studied mathematics and politics at Bath, spent years in bookshops and publishing houses, then began writing seriously in 1994. Floodland, his debut, took the Branford Boase Award. The Ghosts of Heaven is built as four quarters that can be read in any order: a prehistoric girl making the first marks, a woman accused of witchcraft at Golden Beck, a poet confined in a Long Island hospital, an astronaut bound for another world. A spiral binds all four. The Foreshadowing (2005) gives Sasha Fox, a Brighton doctor's daughter who sees deaths before they happen, a nursing post near the Somme. Sedgwick carved stone and engraved wood, was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in 2014, and wrote his last book, All In Your Head, about that illness as a patient rather than a clinician. He died in France on 15 November 2022, at 54.