Patrick Ness

Patrick Ness (born October 17, 1971) is a British-American author, journalist, and lecturer who moved to London at the age of 28 and now holds dual citizenship. He is best known for his books for young adults, including the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls.

Ness won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians both in 2011 and in 2012, for Monsters of Men and A Monster Calls, recognizing each as the best new book for children or young adults published in the U.K. He is one of seven writers to win two Medals (no one has won three) and the second to win consecutively.

He wrote the screenplay of the 2016 film adaptation of A Monster Calls (directed by J.A. Bayona, with Lewis MacDougall and Sigourney Weaver in primary cast.) He is also the creator and writer of the Doctor Who spin-off series Class.

Ness was born on October 17, 1971, near the Fort Belvoir army base, near Alexandria, Virginia, U.S., where his father was a lieutenant in the US Army. They moved to Hawaii, where he lived until he was six, then spent the next ten years in Washington state, before moving to Los Angeles. 

Ness studied English Literature at the University of Southern California. 

After graduating, Ness worked as a corporate writer for a cable company. He published his first story in Genre magazine in 1997 and was working on his first novel when he moved to London in 1999.

Ness was naturalized as a British citizen in 2005. He entered into a civil partnership with his partner in 2006, less than two months after the Civil Partnership Act came into force. In August 2013, Ness and his partner got married following the legalization of same-sex marriage in California.

Ness taught creative writing at Oxford University and has written and reviewed for The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Guardian. He reviews for The Guardian as of July 2012. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and was the first Writer in Residence for Booktrust.

Walker Books has published all four children's novels by Ness to date, one annually from 2008 to 2011. According to news coverage, "He turned to children's fiction after he had the idea for a world where it is impossible to escape information overload, and knew it was right for teenagers."

The first was The Knife of Never Letting Go, and it won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers. The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men were sequels to The Knife; jointly they are called the "Chaos Walking trilogy" and The Knife has been reissued with a front cover banner "Chaos Walking: Book One". Ness has also published three short stories in the Chaos Walking universe, the prequels "The New World", "The Wide, Wide Sea", and "Snowscape", set after the events of Monsters of Men. The short stories are available as free-to-download e-books and have been included in the 2013 UK print editions of the novels.

A Monster Calls (2011) originated with Siobhan Dowd, another writer with the same editor at Walker, Denise Johnstone-Burt. Before her August 2007 death, Dowd and Johnstone-Burt had discussed the story and contracted for Dowd to write it. Afterward, Walker arranged separately with Ness to write and Jim Kay to illustrate, and those two completed the book without meeting. Ness won the Carnegie and Kay won the companion CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal (established 1955), the first time one book has won both medals.

On 7 May 2013, he was revealed to be the author of Tip of the Tongue, the May e-short featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa as part Puffin's eleven Doctor Who e-shorts in honor of the show's 50th anniversary.

His next book, More Than This was released on 5 September 2013, which was nominated for the Carnegie Medal of 2015.

In 2014, Ness delivered the keynote speech at the Children's and Young Adult Program of the Berlin International Literature Festival.

He announced that he was working on a new book called The Rest Of Us Just Live Here set for a 2015 release. On January 20, 2015, Ness announced the official release date of the book via his a tweet: it would be released August 25 in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand; and October 5 in Canada and the USA.

On 1 October 2015, the BBC announced that Ness would be writing a Doctor Who spin-off entitled Class, and the resulting eight-part series aired on BBC Three's online channel toward the end of 2016. In 2017, Ness announced that he was leaving the show at the end of the first season. The BBC later canceled the series Class.

Ness's most recent book, Release, was published on 4 May 2017, dubbed by Ness as a "private and intense book", with more personal inspiration than any before it.

The Knife of Never Letting Go won numerous awards including the Booktrust Teenage Prize, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and the 2008 Tiptree Award. It was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

The Ask and the Answer won the 2009 Costa Book Award in the children's book category. It, too, made the Carnegie shortlist.

Monsters of Men won the CILIP Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

More Than This made the Carnegie shortlist.

The Rest of Us Just Live Here received many awards, including six starred reviews and the Kirkus Best Book of the Year.

Novels

• The Crash of Hennington (2003)
• The Crane Wife (2013)

Novels for young adults

• Chaos Walking series:
  1. The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008)
  2. The Ask and the Answer (2009)
  3. Monsters of Men (2010)
  4. Short stories:
• A Monster Calls (original idea by Siobhan Dowd) (2011)
• More Than This (2013)
• The Rest of Us Just Live Here (2015)
• Release (2017)
• And the Ocean Was Our Sky (Fall 2018)
• Burn (Summer 2020)

Short stories

Collections:

• Topics About Which I Know Nothing (2004), collection of 11 short stories:

Uncollected short stories:

• "Different for Boys", collected in Losing it (2010)
• Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E-Shorts series:
  • 5. "Doctor Who: Tip of the Tongue" (2013)
• "This Whole Demoning Thing", collected in Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, ed. Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (2014)

• Official website
• Patrick Ness at British Council: Literature
• Patrick Ness at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Patrick Ness at Library of Congress Authorities, with 8 catalogue records
• The Knife Of Never Letting Go, chapter one

"Implied Violence", "The Way All Trends Do", "Ponce de Leon is a Retired Married Couple From Toronto", "Jesus' Elbows and Other Christian Urban Myths", "Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?", "Sydney is a City of Jaywalkers", "2,115 Opportunities", "The Motivations of Sally Rae Wentworth, Amazon", "The Seventh International Military War Games Dance Committee Quadrennial Competition and Jamboree", "The Gifted", "Now That You've Died"

1.5. "The New World" (2009)

2.5. "The Wide, Wide Sea" (2013)

3.5. "Snowscape" (2013)