Patrice Lawrence is an award-winning writer. Her debut YA novel, Orangeboy, won the Bookseller YA Prize and the Waterstones Prize for Older Children's Fiction and was shortlisted for the Costa Children's Book Award. Her subsequent novels have been much acclaimed and frequent visitors to prize lists.
Patrice was born in Brighton, raised in an Italian-Trinidadian family in mid-Sussex, and now lives on the South Coast.
Patrice was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2021.
Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton-on-Tees, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. She spent most of her childhood trying to make real life as much like a book as possible. Her first book, Ways to Live Forever, won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize in 2008 and in 2015 her book An Island of Our Own was shortlisted for the Costa children's prize. Sally lives in Liverpool with her husband and two sons, writing stories and trying to believe her luck.
Ella Risbridger is a writer from London. Her first cook book, Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For), was named a Book Of The Year 2019 by half a dozen different publications, including The Times, The Daily Mail, and The Observer. The Secret Detectives is her debut children's book.
Jeanne Willis wrote her first book when she was five - a slim volume about cats written in pencil and stitched together with a painfully blunt needle so that it looked like a 'real' book. After that, there was no turning back. Having been fired from her Saturday job - selling cowboy boots on the Kings Road - for chewing gum, and after a brief career as a reptile vet's assistant, she worked as a copywriter and had her first picture book published at the age of 21 (which she wrote whilst pretending to be busy creating adverts for cognac).
She has since written over 300 books and has won several awards, which are arranged in the attic where she works, along with her collection of caterpillars, pink-toed tarantula skins and live locusts. Jeanne has a keen interest in Natural History and has lost count of the number of species featured in her books, including everything from slugs to sloths. She is currently into corvids - especially Nosy Crows.
Katherine Woodfine has been reading and writing for as long as she can remember. She still has the first 'book' she ever wrote, aged 6 - an action-packed mystery entitled 'The Robbers Who Stole the Crown Jewels'. Fittingly, her first published book, the Sunday Times bestseller The Clockwork Sparrow (2015) was also a mystery featuring a daring jewel theft.
Following on from her debut, Katherine has written seven more historical mysteries in the Sinclair's Mysteries and Taylor & Rose Secret Agents series, following a pair of intrepid Edwardian young lady detectives. She is also the author of a number of books for younger readers, including Sophie Takes to the Sky illustrated by Briony May Smith, Elisabeth and the Box of Colours illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, and A Dancer's Dream illustrated by Lizzy Stewart.
She has contributed to a number of short story anthologies including Winter Magic and Make More Noise. In 2017 she was chosen as one of Hay Festival's Aarhus 39 - a selection of the best children's and young adult writers from all over Europe aged 40 and under.
Katherine lives in Lancashire, close to an old castle, with her family and two black cats.
