Looking Up Jacqueline Wilson Date Of Birth
The basic answer is straightforward. Jacqueline Wilson was born on December 17, 1945 in Claygate, Surrey, England. She's best known for books like "The Story of Tracy Beaker" and "Send a Girl," and she served as the UK Children's Laureate from 2001 to 2003. I've seen a lot of people trip up on this one, mostly because they confuse her with other British authors or mix up the year. I remember pulling my hair out once trying to verify this during a fact-check because multiple sites had slightly different dates floating around — one had 1944, another had December 7. The confusion usually comes from old newspaper archives where the transcription was sloppy, or from fan sites that never bothered to cite their sources. My workaround was going straight to an interview where she mentioned her birthday in passing, then cross-referencing with her official publisher's website (Corgi/Penguin), which lists it consistently as December 17, 1945. Here's something people often miss: Wilson was actually quite young when she started writing professionally, and her early career was shaped heavily by working in advertising and magazine editing before she broke through with children's fiction. That context matters if you're researching her timeline, because some biographical sketches compress her career chronology and make it look like she published her first book much earlier than she actually did. Her first novel, "A Corner of White," came out in 1988, which was over four decades after her birth.
The main pitfall I see online is that a lot of quote sites and listicles just copy-paste each other without verifying. If you're citing this for anything formal — a bibliography, a school paper, a program note — go to her publisher's page or the British Library's author catalog. Those sources are far more reliable than the usual cluster of fan-maintained pages. There's not a lot of controversy around her birth date itself. It's well-established. The only real edge case is if you're looking into genealogical records, which can get messy with common surnames and the way civil registration was handled in postwar England, but that's irrelevant unless you're doing deep archival work. For general purposes, December 17, 1945, is the date that holds up under scrutiny. One more thing worth noting: Wilson turned 80 in 2025, and her continued output at that age is actually notable in children's publishing, where midlist authors tend to fade out. She's still releasing new material, which keeps her bibliography active and means any date-related fact-checking stays relevant rather than becoming a historical curiosity.
