Joan Aiken’s 100th Birthday

Wed 4 Sep 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Joan Aiken’s daughter, Lizza, posted on Bluesky that today, September 4th, is Joan Aiken’s Centenary. Lizza keeps her excellent Wonderful World of Joan Aiken site going as well as ensuring new editions of Joan’s work keep coming out. I’m delighted to take any opportunity to celebrate Joan’s work — although I am taking liberties here as we were never on first name terms. I think I only met her once when she was a guest at the IAFA Conference in Florida and it was a treat. She was an absolute fount of good stories from her childhood with her writer parents who split up to bringing up her own kids in a bus to publishing her first book of short stories (All You’ve Ever Wanted) to working at and writing — sometimes under a pseudonym — for Argosy magazine and others.

20+ years ago I interviewed Joan — by mail, I still have the answers somewhere in a file cabinet — for BookSense.com, the early website of the American Booksellers Association and happily for me Strange Horizons agreed to reprint it as part of a Focus Issue in 2001 where you can a story, poems, and reviews by Beth Kelleher and Jed Hartman.

I was looking for that interview and I read part of an interview Kelly did with Strange Horizons in 2005 where she said we were hoping to reprint Joan’s stories in a multi-volume set. We’d just started dipping our toe in the reprint world with Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog and we didn’t have the experience to know how hard it can be to get publicity or to get bookstores to carry reprints. So the multi-volume set idea went out the window and instead between 2008 and 2016 we published three new collections of Joan’s stories.

The first collection we published was The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories and — it still amazes me — we somehow reached Philip Pullman who sent us this:

“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”

But the real reason to mention that book is to mention UK artist Andi Watson who illustrated it and to send you off to celebrate Joan’s books by checking out this page of illustrators who worked on her stories over the years.