John Marsden, the writer of ‘The Tomorrow to Come’, died at the age of 74

The Australian writer John Marsden loved for his children’s novels ‘The Tomorrow to Come. The tomorrow series’ (Fazi, 2011) and ‘I rabbits’ (Tunué, 2018), died on Wednesday 18 December at the age of 74 years after a long illness. His novels have been translated into nine languages, with over 5 million copies sold, and he lived near Melbourne, where he had been a high school principal. Alice Miller School, one of two schools founded by Marsden in Victoria, confirmed his passing in a letter to parents. “He died at his desk in his home, doing what he loved, writing,” the statement read.

Life and career

He was born on 27 September 1950 in Australia, grew up between Kyneton, in the state of Victoria, and Devonport, in Tasmania, and experienced a troubled adolescence and youth. At the age of 10, the Marsden family moved to Sydney and John was sent to King’s School in Parramatta. Marsden wrote about having “barely” survived the strict school“having ignored or defied most school rules during his years there,” and of having spent the detention time reading.

In 1967, as a teenager, he wrote a letter for the school magazine criticizing the school prefect system, sparking a controversy that resulted in further punishments. He studied art and law at Sydney University, but dropped out and attempted suicide; he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which he said allowed him to begin “building a new life”.

After losing his mind between jobs, at 28 he started a teaching course and eventually became an English teacher, and it was around that time he started writing books. From the beginning he set out to write for young people, after observing the flourishing of the ‘young adult’ genre in the United States. He finished his first novel in just three weeks: ‘So Much to Tell You’, published in 1987, winning several Australian awards.

John Marsden is the author of 40 books among which the highly successful series ‘Tomorrow’ stands out. The seven books in the saga, published between 1993 and 1999, imagine a group of teenagers waging a guerrilla war against the enemy forces surrounding their hometown of Wirrawee. The novels inspired the film ‘The Tomorrow Series’ (2010) by Stuart Beattie with Caitlin Stasey, Rachel Hurd-Wood and Lincoln Lewis, and the TV series ‘Tomorrow, When the War Began’ (2016).

For much of his career, Marsden continued to work as a full-time teacher. He bought property near Hanging Rock where he ran writing courses for school groups, and founded and ran two schools in Victoria: Candlebark, near Romsey, and Alice Miller in Macedon.