Berlie Doherty has written many books for young people and has twice won the Carnegie Medal – for Granny Was a Buffer Girl and Dear Nobody.

Her other titles include Spellhorn, Daughter of the Sea, Willa and Old Miss Annie (Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal) and the anthology Tales of Wonder and Magic. She also writes poetry and plays.

She lives in Yorkshire.

Melvin Burgess was born in London and brought up in Surrey and Sussex. He has had a variety of jobs before becoming a full-time writer. Before his first novel, he had short stories published and a play broadcast on Radio 4.

He is now regarded as one of the best writers in contemporary children's literature, having won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for his acclaimed novel Junk.

Anne Fine read Politics and History at Warwick and then became a teacher. Her first novel was published in 1975 and today she is one of the UK's most successful children's writers.

She has won many awards including two Carnegie Medals, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Prize. Goggle-Eyes was serialised on TV and Madame Doubtfire was made into a hit Hollywood movie.

Anne lives in County Durham.

Matthew Whyman writes for numerous teenage magazines, from Sugar to Bliss and Just Seventeen, and is best known as the Agony Uncle for 19 Magazine. In this capacity he appears regularly on radio and television, and has advised the Chief Medical Officer on the Health of the Young Nation paper. He was also the author of a nationwide body awareness campaign for Radio One FM and the Health Education Authority. He lives in East London with his wife and three children.

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 a little house in Oxford, writing stories and trying to believe her luck.

Theressa Breslin is the Carnegie Medal winning author of over forty books for children & young adults whose work has appeared on stage, radio and TV.

Her books are hugely popular with young people, librarians and teachers. Remembrance, her top selling YA novel of youth in WW1, has now been reissued to include Book Notes.

The Dream Master was shortlisted for the Children's Book Award. Divided City was shortlisted for ten book awards, winning two outright.

Adele Geras was born in Jerusalem on March 15th, 1944. Her father was in the Colonial Office, so she moved around all over the place while she was very young: Nigeria, North Borneo, the Gambia.

She attended boarding-school in England (Roedean) from the age of 11. After Roedean she graduated from St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has worked as an actress and as a French teacher.

Sufiya Ahmedwas born in India and arrived in the UK as a baby. She lived in Bolton, Lancashire, before moving to London where she still lives. Sufiya has worked in advertising and in the House of Commons, but is now a full-time author.

In 2010 Sufiya set up the BIBI Foundation, a non-profit organisation, to arrange visits to the Houses of Parliament for diverse and underprivileged school children. She wrote this book about a kind-hearted bandari and a silly old magarmach after listening to her mother's tales about the Indian jungle.