Margaret+Mahy

Margaret Mahy

Margaret Mahy in 2006. In her stories, she could make the supernatural seem as real as anything natural. Photograph: Chris Skelton/AP



Margaret Mahy, who has died of cancer aged 76, was an original and versatile writer for children of all ages. Her output was large: 40 novels, 20 collections of short stories and more than 100 picture books. And despite the quantity, the quality never dimmed. Whether in short picture books; or witty and enticing short stories, which included The Great Piratical Rumbustification (1978); or complex novels for teenagers, such as The Catalogue of the Universe (1985) or The Magician of Hoad (2008), Mahy held her readers spellbound. Although diverse in some respects, Mahy's books had distinctive characteristics in common. What others might see as boundaries between real and imaginary worlds were effortlessly blurred. Her characters passed easily and unselfconsciously between these worlds. The supernatural is never far away, and is always credible. In Mahy's hands, this makes for vivid and exhilarating fiction. There are enough "rules" from the real world to keep the stories grounded, but the unexpected can, and frequently does, happen. In her native [|New Zealand], Mahy won awards including the Phoenix (a prize for books that have not previously won an award), in 2005 for The Catalogue of the Universe and in 2007 for Memory (1987), and the Sir Julius Vogel award in 2006 for services to science fiction and fantasy. She was made a member of the Order of New Zealand in 1993 and was one of the 12 "local heroes" commemorated in a series of bronze busts in Christchurch in 2009. A Lion in the Meadow (1969), Margaret Mahy's first book Mahy's international reputation was equally great. She won the UK's Carnegie medal twice, for The Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984), both for readers of 10 and above. She was popular and successful as a teller of stories for the very young, with titles such as A Lion in the Meadow (1969, her first book), The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate (1972) and The Boy Who Was Followed Home (1975). In 2006 she received the Hans Christian Andersen award – international recognition for her overall contribution to children's books. She was still writing at the time of her death. Her latest picture book, The Man from the Land of Fandango, with illustrations by Polly Dunbar, will be published later this year. Born in Whakatane, on the North Island of New Zealand, Mahy, who was known as Marg by her friends, began writing early. By her own account, she wrote her first story, Harry Is Bad, at seven. The daughter of an English father and New Zealand mother, she was brought up on the classics of English literature, which she read to herself, and particularly the books of RM Ballantyne and Robert Louis Stevenson. Her father read King Solomon's Mines aloud to her. Asked about her childhood influences and their impact on her writing, Mahy said: "I found it difficult to write a specifically New Zealand story because I got all of my magical displacement from Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh and Swallows and Amazons." But, while the magical ingredients were English, the geography of New Zealand shaped her writing. After school, Mahy studied at Auckland and Canterbury universities. She trained at the New Zealand Library School in Wellington and worked as a librarian, for some years at Canterbury. Many of her early stories were published in the New Zealand School Journal. In 1980, she became a full-time writer. Mahy lived in a house by the sea with a great many cats and could be reclusive. She loved the countryside and went on long walks, talking to herself as she walked, to help sort out what she was trying to write. In her stories, Mahy could make the supernatural seem as real as anything natural. That was not a device for fiction – it was just what she believed. Although funny, robust, forthright, matter of fact and never the least bit fey, she always thought that there was something else, other forces or dimensions which played an important part in our lives. They were there, whether we believed in them or not. She is survived by two daughters, Penny and Bridget. • Margaret Mahy, children's writer, born 21 March 1936; died 23 July 2012 Review from guardian.co.uk