Patrick Ness

British-American author whose Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls established him as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary young adult fiction.

Patrick Ness is a British-American author who has won the Carnegie Medal — the UK’s most prestigious children’s literature award — twice, a distinction he shares with only a handful of writers in the award’s history. Born in Virginia and raised across the United States, he moved to London as an adult and became one of the defining voices in contemporary young adult fiction, acclaimed for the emotional intensity, moral seriousness, and narrative ambition of his work.

The Chaos Walking trilogy, beginning with The Knife of Never Letting Go, is set on a colony world where a virus has given all living creatures the ability to hear each other’s thoughts — a “Noise” that permeates every moment and makes privacy impossible. The series follows Todd Hewitt as he discovers that the society he was raised in is built on lies and violence, and must choose what kind of person to become under extreme pressure. The books deal with war, propaganda, gender, and the ethics of violence with an unflinching honesty unusual in fiction for young readers.

A Monster Calls, which Ness wrote from an idea left by the terminally ill author Siobhan Dowd, is a devastating and beautiful novella about a boy whose mother is dying of cancer and who is visited each night by a monster made of yew tree. It won the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal simultaneously — an unprecedented achievement. Ness has continued to write ambitious, emotionally complex fiction for both young adults and adults, never sacrificing difficulty for comfort.