Mark Haddon is a novelist, who was educated at Uppingham School and Merton College, Oxford. While there, one of his major achievements was to "clock" the Gravitar video game, a fiendishly difficult task which proved beyond the college's most obsessive video nerds.

He won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The book won this prize in the general category as a novel, despite the fact that a separate category exists for children's literature. (Two years previously the same award had been given to another children's book, Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.) According to an interview with the author at Powells.com, this was the first book that Haddon wrote for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publisher suggested marketing it to both audiences.

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

External links

• Haddon on writing, from The Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,6000,1189538,00.html)
• Mark Haddon: This year's big read (http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/interviews/story.jsp?story=483360) (The Independent, January 22, 2004)

fi:Mark Haddon