About the Authors

MALORIE BLACKMAN’S books have won several awards, including the Children’s Book Award for Noughts and Crosses. She has also won the W. H. Smith Mind-Boggling Books Award and the Young Telegraph/Gimme 5 Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Pig-Heart Boy was adapted into a BAFTA-award-winning TV serial. In 2008 Malorie was honoured with an OBE for her services to Children’s Literature.

HENRIETTA BRANFORD was born in India in 1946 but grew up in a remote part of the New Forest. Her first novel, Royal Blunder, was published in 1990. After that she wrote many different sorts of books, from picture books to teenage novels, including Dimanche Diller (Smarties Prize and the Prix Tam-Tam) and Fire, Bed and Bone (Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize). After her death in 1997 a prize was established to commemorate her and her editor Wendy Boase – the Branford Boase Award for a first novel.

GILLIAN CROSS was born in 1945. Although she is now a full-time writer, she has had a number of informal jobs, including being an assistant to a Member of Parliament. Her books include Wolf (Carnegie Medal 1990), The Great Elephant Chase (Whitbread Children’s Book Award, Smarties Prize, 1992) and the titles in the ‘Demon Headmaster’ sequence, which was also made into a TV series.

BERLIE DOHERTY began writing for children in 1982, after teaching and working in radio. She has written more than thirty-five books for children, as well as for the theatre, radio and television. She has won the Carnegie Medal twice: in 1986 for Granny Was a Buffer Girl and in 1991 for Dear Nobody. She has also won the Writer’s Guild Children’s Fiction Award for Daughter of the Sea. Her work is published all over the world, and many of her books have been televised.

ANNE FINE has been an acknowledged top author in the children’s book world since her first book, The Summer-House Loon, was published in 1978, and has now written more than fifty books and won virtually every major award, including the Carnegie Medal (more than once), the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Prize and others. Anne Fine was the Children’s Laureate from 2001–2003. Her best-known books include Madame Doubtfire (which was made into the film Mrs Doubtfire), Goggle-Eyes and Flour Babies.

ALAN GARNER OBE (born in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1934) spent his childhood in Alderley Edge, Cheshire. Many of his works, including The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, are drawn from local legends. The Owl Service won both the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal in 1968. The Stone Book (which received the Phoenix Award in 1996) is poetic in style and inspiration. His collection of essays and public talks, The Voice That Thunders, contains autobiographical material as well as critical reflection upon folklore and language, literature and education, the nature of myth and time.

SUSAN GATES was born in Grimsby, England. Before she became a full-time writer she lived and worked in Malawi, Africa, then taught in schools in Coventry and County Durham in England. She has written more than 100 books for children, many of which have won prizes. She has been overall winner of the Sheffield Children’s Book Award riz Book Atwice, commended for the Carnegie Medal, and Highly Commended for the Nasen Special Educational Needs Award.

ADÈLE GERAS was born in Jerusalem and travelled widely as a child. She started writing over thirty years ago and has published more than eighty books for children and young adults. Ithaka was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, and has two grown-up daughters and two grandchildren.

TONY MITTON is an award-winning poet, whose delightful verse has proved enormously successful with both adults and children, particularly in picture books. He has written for reading schemes and flip-the-flap books, but is best-known for such series as Rap Rhymes, Amazing Machines and Amazing Animals as well as his own poetry books. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two children.

MICHAEL MORPURGO is one of today’s most popular and critically acclaimed children’s writers, author of War Horse (made into an enormously successful stage play) and The Wreck of The Zanzibar amongst many other titles. He has won a multitude of prizes, including the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, the Smarties Prize and the Writer’s Guild Award. Michael Morpurgo’s work is noted for its magical use of storytelling, for characters’ relationships with nature, and for vivid settings.

LINDA NEWBERY is the author of over twenty-five books for children and young adults, including At the Firefly Gate (nominated for the Carnegie Medal), Catcall (Silver Medal, Nestlé Children’s Book Prize), Set in Stone (Costa Children’s Book Prize), Sisterland (shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal) and The Shell House (shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize). She lives in an Oxfordshire village with her husband.

PHILIP PULLMAN is one of the most highly acclaimed children’s authors. He has been on the shortlist of just about every major children’s book award in the last few years, and has won the Smarties Prize for The Firework-Maker’s Daughter and the Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights. He was the first children’s author ever to win the overall Whitbread Book Award (for his novel The Amber Spyglass). A film of Northern Lights (titled The Golden Compass) was made in 2008 by New Line Cinema. He lives in Oxford.

JACQUELINE WILSON is one of the world’s most popular authors for younger readers. She served as Children’s Laureate from 2005–7. The Illustrated Mum was chosen as the British Children’s Book of the Year in 1999 and was winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 2000. She has won the Smarties Prize and the Children’s Book Award for Double Act, which was also highly commended for tthefor Carnegie Medal. In 2002 she was given an OBE for services to literacy in schools, and in 2008 was appointed a Dame.

KIT WRIGHT was born in 1944 and is the author of more than twenty-five books, for both adults and children. His books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974–2000 (2000).