Joan Delano Aiken MBE (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer, especially supernatural fiction and children's alternate history novels. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.