Patrick Ness

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-04

Patrick Ness was born on October 17, 1971, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, near an Army base where his father served as a sergeant. He lived in Hawaii until age six and then in Washington state before his family moved to Los Angeles, where he studied English literature at the University of Southern California. After graduating he worked as a corporate writer for a cable company before publishing his first short story in 1997 and relocating to London in 1999. His debut novel, The Crash of Hennington, appeared in 2003, but he is best known for the Chaos Walking trilogy, comprising The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008), The Ask and the Answer (2009), and Monsters of Men (2010), and for A Monster Calls (2011), completed from notes left by the Irish writer Siobhan Dowd after her death. Ness won the Carnegie Medal in consecutive years, 2011 and 2012, one of only two authors to do so, and A Monster Calls became the first book to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. He also created the Doctor Who spin-off series Class in 2016 and co-wrote the 2021 film adaptation of Chaos Walking.

Universe(s)

Books

• A Monster Calls (2011) · A Monster Calls Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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