www.silverguide.site –

Jane Yolen, who has died aged 87, devoted her professional life to children’s books, not only as an award-winning author but also as an editor, journalist and university teacher. With an exceptional number of books to her name – Terror Birds, her 450th title, is due to be published in July – she was most highly praised for her inventive retellings of fairytales, in which she included both gentle and tough magic, some of which had serious and painful consequences.

Yolen described herself as “a writer of literary or art fairytales, stories that that use the elements of old stories – the cadences, the magical settings or objects – but concern themselves with modern themes”. Critics have described them as being in the best traditions of the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen while Yolen, who enjoyed folk singing, said “I hope my tales sound as if they could be sung”.

Yolen’s imaginative fantasy fiction, including The Mermaid’s Three Wishes (1978), shared many of these qualities, as did her most ambitious and highly regarded novel, The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), a time-travelling story in which Hannah Stern, a contemporary child celebrating Passover with her family, is sent back in time to Poland in 1942 where she lives the experience of being sent to a concentration camp. The book was nominated for a Nebula award, won the children’s book category of the National Jewish Book award, and in 1999 was turned into a film of the same name starring Kirsten Dunst as Hannah.

For younger readers, Yolen wrote picture books including Owl Moon (1987), illustrated by John Schoenhurr, a simply written, poetic story about a child’s first experience of a wintry landscape, which won the Caldecott medal.

Given the remarkable number of books she wrote, which included a handful of adult novels, it is not surprising that she was frequently labelled as “prolific”. It was not a description that Yolen valued. Instead, she said: “I would rather say I have a very low threshold of boredom and so I have tried my hand at many different kinds of writing: picture books, fantasy, fairytales, straight fiction, verse, and non-fiction.”

Among her non-fiction titles are two volumes about children’s books, Writing Books for Children (1973) and Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood (1981), in which she wrote: “I believe that culture belongs in the cradle. Literature is a continuous process from childhood onward … The continuum of literature is best maintained by tales of fantasy, fancy, faerie and the supra-natural, those crafted visions and bits and pieces of dream-remembering that link our past to our present.”

The daughter of Isabel (nee Berlin), a psychiatric social worker, and Will Yolen, a journalist and publicist, Jane was born and brought up in New York City until she was a teenager, when her family moved to Connecticut. Her first publicly shared work appeared in a newspaper she wrote with her brother, Steve, for the New York apartment block they lived in as children, and sold to residents at five cents a copy.

Yolen described herself as a “gold star” student at school. While studying for a degree in English and Russian literature at Smith College, Massachusetts, she wrote lyrics and poetry, and performed in college shows. Her first book, Pirates in Petticoats, was accepted for publication on her 22nd birthday and came out in 1963.

Seeking a firmer grounding in the ways of children’s publishing, she took a course at the New School for Social Research in New York, and from then on wrote several books a year, as well as working as an assistant editor for Knopf children’s books, and studying for a master’s at the University of Massachusetts, after which she taught at Smith College from 1979 until 1984.

Yolen married David Stemple, a computer scientist, in 1962. His treatment for cancer and death in 2006 prompted two collections of poetry, The Radiation Sonnets (2003) and Things to Say to a Dead Man (2011).

She is survived by their children, Adam, Heidi and Jason, and six grandchildren, and by her brother.

• Jane Hyatt Yolen, children’s author and editor, born 11 February 1939; died 11 June 2026