Marsden, the man
He’s the writer you dreamed of becoming, the treeclimbing school teacher you wished you’d had and the über-cool stepdad from the movies. John Marsden is one of Australia’s national treasures and foremost “teen activists”, a grassroots campaigner for the rights of education, imagination and creative expression.
For most of us, Marsden is best known as the author of the books we tucked up in bed with as kids, his provocative, often dark novels gathering a cult following here and overseas. He has sold more than 5 million copies around the world, including in Sweden, where in 2000 the government paid to have one of his books distributed to every child of appropriate age in the country.
They didn’t need to get formal about it in Australia: even the most reluctant reader inevitably found themselves glued to the pages of the Tomorrow series in the early 90s, propping their eyes open to find out what happens to the group of kids trying to survive in a dangerous new world.
Still, getting words out of him now is not as easy as I expected. Not for lack of stories but for the time to share them. In what is almost the ultimate sacrifice for a prolific writer, in recent years Marsden has put
