Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon (born 1962 in Northampton) is a novelist, who was educated at Uppingham School and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English.

He won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a book that is written from the point of view of a boy with Asperger syndrome. However, some people with Aspergers syndrome disagree with this depiction. (Haddon had worked with autistic people as a young man.) According to an interview with the author at Powells.com, this was the first book that Haddon wrote intentionally for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publisher suggested marketing it to both adult and child audiences. His second adult-novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006.

Mark Haddon is also known for his series of Agent Z books, one Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars which was made into a 1996 Children's BBC sitcom.

He also wrote the screenplay for the BBC television adaptation of Raymond Briggs's story Fungus the Bogeyman, screened on BBC1 in 2004.

Haddon is a vegetarian, and enjoys vegetarian cookery. He describes himself as a 'hard-line atheist'.

Mark Haddon lives in Oxford is married to Dr Sos Eltis, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

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