Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon Poems

Mark Haddon Biography

Mark Haddon (born 26 September 1962) is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). He won the Whitbread Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work. Haddon was born on 26 September 1962 in Northampton, England. He was educated at Uppingham School and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English. In 1987, Haddon wrote his first children’s book, Gilbert’s Gobstopper. This was followed by many other children’s books, which were often self-illustrated. Haddon is also known for his series of Agent Z books, one of which, Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars, 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. In 2007 he wrote the BBC television drama Coming Down the Mountain. In 2003, Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award—in the Novels rather than Children's Books category—for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the Best First Book category, as The Curious Incident was considered his first written for adults;[1] yet he also won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award judged by a panel of children's writers. The Curious Incident is written from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome. In an interview at Powells.com, Haddon claimed that this was the first book that he wrote intentionally for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publisher suggested marketing it to both adult and child audiences (it has been very successful with adults and children alike). His second adult novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006. His short story, "The Pier Falls", was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the richest prize in the world for a single short story.)

The Best Poem Of Mark Haddon

Trees

They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.

You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.

Or you will wake at your aunt's cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.

Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.
We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You're reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.

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