Gill Arbuthnott (Author)

Gill Arbuthnott, author of The Keepers’ Daughter, had been writing secretly since she was ten, and only admitted this to her somewhat surprised family when her first book was accepted by a publisher. Her ideas come from all sorts of unlikely...

Blue Balliett (Author)

Blue Balliett, author of the fantastic book Chasing Vermeer, was born in New York City. After studying art history in college and attending Brown University, Blue moved to Nantucket Island, in Massachusetts, in order to write. She met her husband...

Sophia Bennett (Author)

Sophia Bennett won The Times/Chicken House Competition 2009 with her fabulous debut children’s novel Threads. Her great loves are art and design, her four children, fashion magazines, cappuccino, her husband and her job (but not necessarily in...

Kirsten Boie (Author)

Kirsten Boie, author of The Princess Plot and its sequel The Princess Trap, was born in Hamburg, where she still lives with her family. Initially working as a secondary school teacher, she began writing after the adoption of her first child, and...

Erin Bow (Author)

Erin Bow, author of Wood Angel, was raised in Omaha where she was fond of tromping through woods and reading books by flashlight. At university she studied particle physics, but soon diverted her attentions to writing. Her poetry has won the CBC...

Emma Clayton (Author)

Emma Clayton, author of The Roar, was born in 1968 and now lives in Leamington Spa with her two children. In her late teens, she trained as a Field Archaeologist with the Oxford Archaeological Unit, then went on to become a freelance illustrator...

James Dashner (Author)

James Dashner, author of The Maze Runner, was born and raised in Georgia in the United States. He now lives in the Rocky Mountains with his family. After several years working in finance, he is now a full-time writer.

Emily Diamand (Author)

Emily Diamand, author of Flood Child and its sequel Flood and Fire, grew up in a small town in rural Oxfordshire. She studied Environmental Science at university and says the book she would most like to have written is Holes by Louis Sachar. Emily...

Jimmy Docherty (Author)

Jimmy Docherty, who wrote The Ice Cream Con for Chicken House, is an award-winning copywriter and television commercial director. He was born in Bellshill, Scotland in 1976. After leaving school, Jimmy studied Film, TV and Radio Production in...

Salamanda Drake (Author)

Salamanda Drake, author of the Dragonsdale books, is sixteen years old and lives with her father, a dragon-trader, in the Isles of Bresal. Her love of dragons began at the age of three, when her Da began taking her to fairs and showings around the...

Kerstin Gier (Author)

Kerstin Gier, author of Girl About Time, was born in 1966 and has written many bestselling German women’s titles. She lives in a small village in Germany with her husband and son and a very old black cat.

Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams (Author)

Roderick Gordon, co-author of the Tunnels series, grew up in Highgate, North London. Chronically shy throughout his childhood, he sought refuge in drawing and writing, and had one of his first short stories published in a school magazine...

Stuart Hill (Author)

Stuart Hill, author of the popular fantasy novels The Cry of the Icemark, Blade of Fire and Last Battle of the Icemark, was born in 1958 and raised in Leicester, England where he still lives. The book he would most like to have written is King...

David Jones (Author)

David Jones, author of Baboon and Meltdown, has written radio plays, scripts for museum exhibits around the world, and even an interactive show at NASA’s Space Center Houston. His non-fiction books cover scientific subjects from robots to...

Elizabeth Kay (Author)

Elizabeth Kay, author of the Divide series, was born in 1949 and lives in Surrey, England. She has wanted to write since she was four. After school, Elizabeth went to art school and did her foundation year at Epsom, then fine art at Nottingham after...

Ingrid Lee (Author)

Ingrid Lee, author of Dog Lost, was born in 1948 and lives in Toronto, Canada. As a child she wanted to be her hero, Madame Curie. The book she would most like to have written is A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Her advice for budding...

Michael Molloy (Author)

Michael Molloy, author of The Witch Trade, The House on Falling Star Hill and Peter Raven Under Fire, was born in 1940 and lives in Ealing, London. After school he got a job on a newspaper. The book he would most like to have written is The...

Andrew Newbound (Author)

Andrew Newbound, author of the all-action Demon Strike, grew up on the edges of the Rhubarb Triangle in Yorkshire, wanting to be a private investigator. After school he studied journalism at college, before dropping out to become a debt...

Andrew Peters (Author)

Andrew Fusek Peters, author of Ravenwood, was born 1965 in Hildesheim, Germany, and brought up in London. He has been climbing and talking to trees from the time he was small - so the story of Ravenwood has been a long time in development!...

Rebecca Promitzer (Author)

Rebecca Promitzer, author of The Pickle King, is a successful young writer and director. She has written amongst other things for the children’s television series The Secret of Eel Island and adapted The Fall of the House of Usher for the...

Katherine Roberts (Author)

Katherine Roberts, author of Spellfall, won the inaugural Branford Boase Award for her first novel Song Quest, part of the Echorium trilogy. She is also author of the Seven Fabulous Wonders series (translated into 12 languages so far) and the...

Sarah Rubin (Author)

Sarah Rubin, author of Dreamer Ballerina, grew up on an island off the coast of Maine, spending most of her childhood dressing up, reading, and trying to get lost in the woods. Sarah earned her BA in Creative Writing and History from Skidmore...

Alan Shea (Author)

Alan Shea, author of The Amazing Mind of Alice Makin, was born in 1945 and grew up in Stepney, London. He now lives in Essex. After school, he became a registered dock-worker, working in gangs unloading and loading ships on the east-end docks in...

Trenton Lee Stewart (Author)

Trenton Lee Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of The Mysterious Benedict Society, which won the E. B. White Read Aloud Award for Older Readers, among other honours. Born in 1970, he grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, USA and currently...

Allan Stratton (Author)

Allan Stratton is the internationally acclaimed author of Chanda's Secrets, winner of the American Library Association's Michael L. Printz Honor Book, the Children's Africana Book Award, and Booklist's Editor's Choice among others. Allan’s...

Di Toft (Author)

Di Toft, author of Wolven, lives in Portishead with her family and their dog called Dave, who is so enormous he can be seen from space on Google Earth. Wolven is her first book for The Chicken House. The sequel, entitled Wolven: The Twilight...

Pat Walsh (Author)

Pat Walsh, author of The Crowfield Curse, was the runner up in our 2008 Times Chicken House Writing Competition. She was born in a haunted house in Kent and spent her early years in West Africa and Ireland, before her family settled in...

Philip Webb (Author)

Philip Webb, author of Scavs, had a happy childhood, roaming and exploring and was fascinated by the local rubbish dump where he played out lots of post-apocalyptic adventures with his friends. He was born in 1967 and works as a user experience...

Kate Wild (Author)

Kate Wild, author of Fight Game and Firefight, was born in 1954 and lives in Leicester. Fifteen years after leaving school she decided to go to university and to earn extra money while she was there, she worked part time at a video production...