Peter Dickinson was born 16 December 1927 in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), but he has said that he has little memory of his exotic African roots. When Dickinson was seven his father, Richard Sebastian Willoughby Dickinson, a colonial administrator, moved the family to England in 1935 and died shortly afterward. In 1941 Dickinson won a scholarship to Eton College. Upon graduation in 1946, he was conscripted and served as a district signals officer in the British army. At the end of his military service in 1948, Dickinson enrolled at King's College, Cambridge, and completed his B.A. in English literature in 1951. The next year he began working as an editor and reviewer with Punch. Although his career there did not get off to an auspicious start--he was hit by a tram and had to attend the interview covered in blood--he stayed for seventeen years before resigning in 1969 to devote himself full time to writing. On 20 April 1953 Dickinson married Mary Rose Barnard, with whom he had four children. She died in 1988, and on 3 January 1992 he married the American fantasy writer Robin McKinley.
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