Aidan Chambers was a teacher of English and Drama in secondary schools for eleven years. In 1968 he became a freelance author of fiction and a writer about and speaker on reading and literature. He is best known for a sequence of six novels of adolescence, beginning with Breaktime published in 1978 and concluding with This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, published in 2005. The Carnegie Medal was awarded to the fifth book in the sequence, Postcards from No Man's Land (1999), and in 2002 he received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for the body of his work.