Marcus Sedgwick was born in Preston, Kent, in April 1968, and came to writing through the book trade rather than around it. He sold books at Heffers in Cambridge and worked in sales for the small children’s publisher Ragged Bears and then for Walker Books, learning the industry from the inside before he began writing seriously in 1994.
Floodland, his first novel, appeared in 2000 and won the Branford Boase Award for the best debut children’s novel of its year. What followed was a body of work of unusual range: more than forty books across three decades, for children, for teenagers and for adults, and rarely twice in the same register. There were the gothic and the folkloric — Witch Hill, The Dark Horse, My Swordhand Is Singing and its sequel The Kiss of Death, which between them took the Booktrust Teenage Prize in 2007. There was historical fiction in The Foreshadowing and Blood Red, Snow White. There were the comic series written for younger readers, the Raven Mysteries and Elf Girl and Raven Boy and the Cudweed books, one of which, Lunatics and Luck, won a Blue Peter Book Award. And there were the adult novels, A Love Like Blood, Mister Memory and The Monsters We Deserve among them.
He won America’s Michael L. Printz Award, the most significant prize in young adult writing, three times — for Revolver, for Midwinterblood and for The Ghosts of Heaven — and by the time of his death he was the most-nominated author in the prize’s history. He illustrated some of his own books, having trained his eye in the trade, and in 2019 he wrote the book-length poem Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black with his brother Julian. He was writer in residence at Bath Spa University from 2011 to 2014, reviewed for the Guardian, and played the drums with more enthusiasm than most novelists manage.
In 2014 he was diagnosed with ME, the illness also called chronic fatigue syndrome, and it changed both his life and the direction of his last book. He moved to the French Alps and later to the Dordogne. All In Your Head is the result: an account, by a writer who had spent his career imagining other people’s interior lives, of what it is to sit in front of a doctor who does not believe that you are ill — who suspects you of imagining a serious ailment, or of something worse than that. It is the only one of his books in which the interior life under examination is his own.
He died in France in November 2022, aged 54.