Jacqueline Wilson

Dame Jacqueline Wilson, DBE, FRSL (born 17 December 1945) is an English writer of children's literature. Because her novels commonly deal with themes as adoption, divorce and mental illness, her work has been called controversial because her readers are young. For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer, Wilson was a UK nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2014.

Wilson is the author of many book series. Her Tracy Beaker series, inaugurated in 1991 with The Story of Tracy Beaker, includes three sequels and has been adapted into four CBBC television series: The Story of Tracy Beaker, Tracy Beaker Returns, The Dumping Ground and The Tracy Beaker Files.

Life and career

Jacqueline Wilson was born in Bath, Somerset, in 1945. Her father was a civil servant; her mother was an antiques dealer. Jacqueline spent most of her childhood in Kingston upon Thames, where she went to Latchmere Primary School. She was an imaginative child who enjoyed both reading and inventing stories. She particularly enjoyed books by Noel Streatfeild, as well as American classics like Little Women and What Katy Did. As early as aged seven, she filled Woolworths notebooks with stories of her imaginary games. At the age of nine she wrote her first "novel" which was 18 sides long. That story, Meet the Maggots, was about a family with seven children. Although she was good at English, she had no interest in mathematics; she would often stare out the window and imagine rather than pay attention to the class, leading her final-year teacher at Latchmere to nickname her "Jacky Daydream". Jacqueline Wilson later used the nickname as the title of the first stage of her autobiography.