Margaret Mahy, an award-winning children’s author who tested the limits of her readers’ whimsy and courage with fantastical tales of witches, hauntings, infinite fog, and robbers brought to account by peppery grown-ups wielding chocolate cake and balloons, died on Monday at her home in Christchurch, New Zealand. She was 76. …
Read her New York Times obit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/books/margaret-mahy-childrens-author-dies-at-76.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimesworld&seid=auto