William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more…
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about…
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his …
Sir Michael Andrew Morpurgo, OBE, FRSL is the author of many books for children, five of which have been made into films. He also writes his own screenplays and libretti for opera. Born in St Albans, …
Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, often known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, travel writer, and editor of the…
David Almond is a British children's writer who has penned several novels, each one to critical acclaim. He was born and raised in Felling and Newcastle in post-industrial North East England and educa…
Susan Hill was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire in 1942. Her hometown was later referred to in her novel A Change for the Better (1969) and some short stories especially "Cockles and Mussels".
Laird was born in New Zealand in 1943, the fourth of five children. Her father was a ship's surgeon; both he and Laird's mother were Scottish. In 1945, Laird and her family returned to Britain and she…
Robert Swindells was born in Bradford in 1939, the eldest of five children. He left the local Secondary Modern School at fifteen to work as a copy holder on the local newspaper. At seventeen he enlist…
Patrick Ness, an award-winning novelist, has written for Radio 4 and The Sunday Telegraph and is a literary critic for The Guardian. He has written many books, including the Chaos Walking Trilogy, The…
Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands in 1976, attended Wolverhampton Grammar School and graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first class degree in English Lan…
I write pictures and doodle words for Bloomsbury, Puffin, Oxford University Press, Simon & Schuster, Scholastic, The Guardian, Disney, Nickelodeon. After leaving art college in ’97, I spent nearly 10 …
Alex T. Smith is the creator of the much-loved and bestselling Claude fiction series for early readers. He was the official World Book Day illustrator in 2014, and other recent accolades include the U…
Andy Mulligan was brought up in the south of London. He worked as a theatre director for ten years before travels in Asia prompted him to retrain as a teacher. He has taught English and drama in India…
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics…
Kieran Larwood is the author of Freaks, and was the winner of the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition 2011. Kieran is one of only two male Reception class teachers on the Isle of Wight. H…
John Boynton Priestley was an English writer. He was the son of a schoolmaster, and after schooling he worked for a time in the local wool trade. Following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Pries…
Nizrana Farook was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the beautiful landscapes of her home country find their way into the stories she writes. She has a master’s degree in writing for young pe…
Ben Lerwill has been working as a freelance travel writer for over fifteen years. His work has appeared in more than fifty national and international publications, from The Sunday Times to National Ge…
