Mary Hooper obituary (opens in new tab)

My mum, the author Mary Hooper, who has died aged 81, left school aged 15 with no qualifications. Her last school report said: “Far too noisy and talkative.” When she was a young mother in the 1970s she read a short story and thought “I could do better than that,” wrote one up and sent it to Jackie magazine. To her surprise, it sold for £14.She went on to write hundreds of stories and more than 100 books for children and young adults, before YA was an official genre. Among them were Newes fro...