Celebrated author and educator John Marsden, best known for his dystopian young adult Tomorrow series, has died aged 74.

The bestselling author of more than 40 books, Marsden spent his early years in country Victoria and Tasmania, before moving to Sydney when he was ten. There, he attended the strict Kings School, where he “got in endless trouble” as a secondary student and “defied every rule and regulation”.

His difficult early life seemed to feed into his work as a writer and teacher of young people, including founding two alternative schools in Victoria: Candlebark, a prep to year seven school, in Romsey (founded in 2006), and a secondary school, the Alice Miller School in Macedon (in 2016).

Reflecting on the Tomorrow series, which has sold millions of copies worldwide, he wrote,

I resented the control adults had over my life. I got sick of being told what to do and when to do it, what not to do and how I should be. I daydreamed occasionally of a world where the adults miraculously disappeared.

In his books, he was able to give licence to his daydreams.

I read his early novels in high school. Those were the days when friends passed books around, before phones. I can picture the bedroom where I encountered So Much To Tell You (1987), about a traumatised teen who confronts her wounds through writing a diary – and the friend who owned it, whose own family life had splinters of darkness.

But it was the Tomorrow series that hooked me: afternoons spent as a 20-something in the Northcote library, reading compulsively. As a children’s writer and creative writing teacher, I’ve tried to stay loyal to that young-adult self, who couldn’t stop turning the pages.

Like Marsden, I look at young people, whether they’re my characters, my children or my students, and I see their strengths. I listen to them and hear the stories beneath their stories, their........

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