'Mastering his imagination'

“From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.” – Mark Haddon 

 

Born in England on this date in 1962, Haddon is best known for his amazing book and play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – a story of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome – for which he won the Whitbread Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize.                   

                          

 The author of nearly 30 books and many short stories, Haddon said it was his “late” discovery of the joy of reading that took him off a path toward mathematics and onto one in the writing world.   “When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.”

Haddon likes to use a combination of humor, sensitivity and adventure in his writing and advises beginning writers to, “Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.”