The Australian author John Marsden, beloved for young adult novels including the Tomorrow series and The Rabbits, has died aged 74.

Alice Miller School, one of two schools that Marsden founded in Victoria, confirmed his death in a letter to parents. “He died at his desk in his home, doing what he loved, writing,” the statement read. The Guardian has confirmed his death separately, but no cause of death has yet been given.

Marsden was born in 1950 and grew up in both Kyneton, Victoria, and Devonport, Tasmania. His great-great-great-great uncle was the colonial Anglican clergyman and magistrate Rev Samuel Marsden. Marsden’s mother encouraged education and reading, so he grew up on Daniel Defoe, Ian Fleming and Enid Blyton.

When he was 10, the Marsdens moved to Sydney and he was sent to the King’s School, Parramatta. Marsden wrote that he “barely” survived the strict school, “having ignored or defied most of the school rules during his years there”, and spent his time in detention reading. In 1967, as a teenager, he wrote a letter for the school magazine criticising the school’s prefect system that caused a controversy and gave him a taste of the power of language.

He studied arts and law at the University of Sydney, but dropped out and became suicidal. He was eventually admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which he later said enabled him to begin “building a new life”. After drifting between jobs, he began a teaching course at 28 and eventually became an English teacher, which was when he began writing books.

From the beginning he set out to write for young people, having watched as the young adult genre blossomed in the US. He finished his first complete novel in just three weeks: So Much to Tell You, which was published in 1987, won many awards and would go on to be studied by countless Australian students.

Over the next 40 years he wrote and edited 40 books, including Letters from the Inside, The Rabbits and the hugely successful Tomorrow series, beginning with Tomorrow, When the War Began. The seven books in the series, published between 1993 and 1999, imagined a group of teenagers waging a guerrilla war on enemy forces surrounding their home town of Wirrawee.

Marsden said he first had the idea when he was a teenager, “fantasising about a world without adults, because pretty much all the adults I encountered were authoritarian, were not interested in fairness or justice … they were really a bloody nuisance”.

The series, along with the three books in a sequel series, were bestsellers in both Australia and the US and were translated into five languages. In Sweden, free copies of Tomorrow, When the War Began were distributed to hundreds of thousands of teenagers after it was voted the book most likely to inspire a love of reading.

Marsden sold millions of books globally; in Australia alone he sold an estimated 3m books. In the US, the American Library Association placed Tomorrow, Where the War Began at number 41 on its list of the 100 best books for teens published between 1966 and 2000. It was also voted Australia’s favourite Australian book in a 2013 government poll.

He won many awards, including the prestigious Lloyd O’Neil award for his contributions to Australian publishing in 2006.

For much of his career, Marsden continued to work as a teacher full-time. He bought a property near Hanging Rock where he ran writing camps for school groups, and founded and served as principal at two schools in regional Victoria: Candlebark, near Romsey, and Alice Miller in Macedon.

“Running a school is probably the most intense and complicated job I’ve had in my life. The only thing I can compare it to is when I worked in the emergency department at Sydney Hospital when I was about 19,” he told the ABC in 2018.

He is survived by his wife, Kristin, and his six stepsons.