Diana Wynne Jones, whose critically admired stories and novels for children and teenage readers imagined fantastical worlds inhabited by wizards, witches, magicians and ordinary boys and girls, died on Saturday in Bristol, England. She was 76.
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The cause was cancer, Sandee Roston, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins Childrens Books, Ms. Joness publisher, said in an e-mail message.
Though she never became the household name in the United States that J. K. Rowling did with the Harry Potter franchise, Ms. Joness work was especially relished by connoisseurs of the young-adult fantasy and science fiction genres. She wrote more than 35 books, including the Chrestomanci series, which focuses on a powerful enchanter who presides over a world in which magic is, in her words, as common as music. Another popular book, Howls Moving Castle (1986), about a young girl transformed into an old crone by a spiteful witch, was adapted into a 2004 animated film.
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