Sam Youd was born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.

As a boy, he was devoted to the newly emergent genre of science-fiction: 'In the early thirties,' he later wrote, 'we knew just enough about the solar system for its possibilities to be a magnet to the imagination.'

Over the following decades, his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels, cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers, light comedies ... In all, under his own name and a variety of pen-names, he published fifty-six novels and a myriad of short stories.

He is perhaps best known as John Christopher, author of the seminal work of speculative fiction, The Death of Grass, and a stream of novels in the genre he pioneered, YA dystopian fiction, beginning with The Tripods Trilogy.

'I read somewhere,' Sam once said, 'that I have been cited as the greatest serial killer in fictional history, having destroyed civilisation in so many different ways - through famine, freezing, earthquakes, feral youth combined with religious fanaticism, and progeria.'

Titles published under the pen-name of Hilary Ford and under his own name are also available on Amazon.

‘Hilary’, as a name, is epicene: there are male Hilarys, there are female Hilarys. For Sam Youd, a writer who set out to tell a story from the viewpoint of a woman – a woman whose personality combined a natural femininity with a spirited independence – it seemed a particularly apposite choice of pen-name.

When the first Hilary Ford novel was published (back in 1958), the writer tells us, it ‘engendered some interesting feedback from male readers. One told me he was a First Mate in the mercantile marine and “worshipped my every fault and failing”. Another, from an impressive Westminster address, offered to wine and dine me in an unspecified but fairly obvious cause.’

During a writing career spanning more than six decades Sam Youd published fifty-six novels, seven of these as Hilary Ford. He was perhaps best known as John Christopher, author of The Death of Grass and the YA dystopian series The Tripods.

Titles published under both these names are also available on Amazon.