Mark Kheddon

Mark Haddon is an English writer, illustrator, and screenwriter.

He was born in Northampton in 1962.

In 1981 he graduated from Oxford, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English language and literature at Merton College. He then held several jobs, including working as a box office cashier and delivering mail by bicycle, and in 1984 he completed a master’s dissertation in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Around that time Haddon began illustrating various magazines and soon became a cartoonist. However, this work did not satisfy him, and while illustrating children’s books he also began writing them himself. Haddon’s first children’s book was published in 1987, and he has since written more than a dozen.

In his youth he worked with people with autism, which later helped him in writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

He is also known as the author of the Agent Z series. In 1996, BBC Children’s produced a sitcom based on Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars. Haddon also wrote the television screenplay for an adaptation of Raymond Briggs’s comic Fungus the Bogeyman for BBC1 in 2004. In 2007 he wrote the television play Coming Down the Mountain.

Mark Haddon is a vegetarian and a committed atheist. He enjoys cooking. He lives in Oxford with his wife, Sos Eltis, and their two sons.