Susan Cooper was born in 1935, in Burnham, Buckinghamshire where she lived until she was 21 andher parents moved to her grandmother's village of Aberdovey, Wales. After leaving Slough High School she gained a place at Oxford where she read English. She is the highly accalimed author of The Dark is Rising sequence as well as novels for adults and children, ...

Brought up in mining village of Penistone, near Sheffield, Brian Wildsmith was born into a mining family. After studying at Barnsley Art School he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied for three years.

Brian is a talented musician and spent his National Service teaching music at the Royal Military School of Music, but he soon gave up teaching ...

Alexis Deacon graduated in 2001 from the University of Brighton where he studied illustration, earning an honours degree. He now lives in London. Slow Loris his first children's book was published in 2003. This was followed by Beegu which was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. His most recent picturebook, While You Are Sleepi ...

Luisa Plaja lives in Devon with her husband and two young children. She is a huge fan of teenage chick-lit. Split by a Kiss is her first novel.

Synopsis: Jo has just moved to America with her mum. She's always been a fairly average girl - not a nerd but certainly never one of the popular kids. But on her first day in her new school, she seems to be ...

Having survived an earthquake, house fire and being bombed all before the age of 11, Leila Rasheed moved from Libya back to the UK. Leila has an MA in Children's Literature and Creative Writing. She started working at Reading Is Fundamental, a children's literacy charity, before moving to Belgium, and now works as the children's bookseller for Waterstone's in Brussels. ...

Beverley Naidoo was born in South Africa. She grew up under apartheid laws that gave privilege to white children. Black children were sent to separate, inferior schools and their families were told where they could live, work and travel. Apartheid denied all children the right to grow up together with equality, justice and respect. As a student, Beverley began to question racism and the idea th ...

Marie- Louise Jensen's debut novel Between Two Seas tells the story of Marianne, a young girl on the verge of womanhood who promises her dying mother that she will try to find her father. MArianne resolves to leave her home in Grimsby and make the long and arduous sea voyage across the North Sea to Skagen in Denmark. But will she be welcomed?

Karen Saunders, a fellow ...

Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two, and she and her brother were brought up by her mother. She has always loved reading, and spent most of her childhood trying to make real life work like it did in books. After school, she worked in Japan for six months and travelled around Australia and New Zealand, then came back and ...

Caldecott Honor–winning illustrator and New York Times bestselling author Brian Selznick graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with the intention of becoming a set designer for the theater. However, after spending three years selling books and designing window displays for a children’s bookstore in Manhattan, he was inspired to create children’s books of his own. ...

Mary Hoffman was born in a “dull little town” which grew up around the railways. Her father worked for the railways, as did all the males of the family on both sides. Just before she was three, her family moved to London, where her father had a job in an office under the ground at Waterloo (which could only be reached by a maze of subterranean passages).

At Primary School she ...