Nina Bawden was an English novelist and children's writer. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987 and the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. She is one of a select group to have both served as a Booker judge and made the shortlist as an author.

Bawden was born in 1925 and raised in Ilford, Essex, in "a rather nasty housing estate that [her] mother despised". Her mother was a teacher and her father a member of the Royal Marines. She was evacuated during World War II to Aberdare, Wales, at age fourteen. She spent school holidays at a farm in Shropshire with her mother and her brothers.
She attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
From 1946 to 1954 Bawden was married to Harry Bawden. They had two sons, Nicholas (who committed suicide in 1981) and Robert. In 1954 she married Austen Kark, a reporter who eventually rose to managing director of the BBC World Service. They had a daughter, Perdita, who died in March 2012. She also had two stepdaughters: Cathy lives in New Zealand and Teresa in London.
In 2002 Bawden was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash, in which her husband Austen Kark was killed. Her testimony about the crash, and the management and maintenance mistakes that caused it, became a major part of David Hare's play The Permanent Way.
Bawden died at her home in north London in August 2012. Her family announced the death on 22 August.
She wrote more than 40 books and was best-known for her novel "Carrie's War" (1973), based on her World War II childhood experiences in England.
Publishing her early novels about adult gothics and mysteries in 1950s. By the 1960s, she focused her writing towards children's stories with titles such as "The Secret Passage" (1963), "On the Run" (1964), "The White Horse Gang" (1966), "A Handful of Thieves" (1967) and "The Grain of Truth" (1969). Some of her other noted works included winner of the Guardian Prize "The Peppermint Pig" (1975), "Solitary Child" (1976), "William Tell" (1981), "Circles of Deceit" (1987) and "Dear Austen" (2005).
In 1995, she was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and received the prestigious ST Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime's contribution to literature in 2004. Her "Carrie's War" novel, won the Phoenix Award in 1993, was twice a BBC Television production and broadcasted in the United States on the PBS series, "Masterpiece Theater" in 2006.

Source: Wikipedia.org