Jan Needle was born in Portsmouth on the south coast of England and moved to the north west when he was 20 to join the Daily Herald.
At 25 he left full-time journalism and took a degree in drama at Manchester University, where he started writing plays for stage and radio, then short stories and later novels.
In following years he made a living with journalism, radio and television drama, stage plays, and novel-writing, at first for children and later for adults too. He also wrote books and essays of dramatic criticism.
His first novel, Albeson and the Germans, was published in l977 and was followed within two years by My Mate Shofiq and A Fine Boy for Killing, both of which are still in print.
He went on to write many novels for children and adults, some making it onto the stage and screen. He continued the William Bentley series of nautical historic fictions, with which he hoped to strip the genre of some of its romantic elements (and still make a living!).
More recently he created “young person’s” versions of Moby Dick and other classics, to open up this sometimes heavy-going world to a new generation.
He continued writing into his 80th year, with novellas and ideas other works under development when he died in October 2023.
Read his obituary in the Guardian.
Find out more about why he wrote, in his own words.