Maria Kuzniar spent six years living in Spain, teaching English and travelling the world, which inspired her debut novel The Ship of Shadows.

Now she lives in Nottingham with her husband, where she reads and writes as much as she can and bookstagrams at cosyreads.

Mary Watson is from Cape Town and now lives on the West Coast of Ireland with her husband and three young children.

Highlights of her adult writing career include being awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing in Oxford in 2006, and being included on the Hay Festival 's 2014 Africa39 list of influential writers from sub-Saharan Africa.

Dawn Kurtagich is the award-winning author of The Dead House, And the Trees Crept In, Teeth in the Mist and Blood on the Wind.

She leaves her North Wales crypt after midnight during blood moons. The rest of the time she exists somewhere between mushrooms, maggots and mould.

She is enjoying life with her new liver, Lucy, her husband, two black cats, and those moldy forest mushrooms we mentioned earlier.

Melinda Salisbury was born in the 1980's in a landlocked city, before escaping to live by the sea.

As a child, she genuinely thought Roald Dahl's Matilda was her biography.

When she's not trying to unlock the hidden avenues of her mind, she's reading, writing, or travelling.

Louie Stowell started her career writing carefully-researched books about space, Ancient Egypt, politics and science but eventually lapsed into just making stuff up.

She likes writing about dragons, wizards, vampires, fairies, monsters and parallel worlds. She lives in London with her wife Karen, her dog Buffy, and a creepy puppet that is probably cursed.

Amy McCulloch is a Canadian living in London, who fits writing around work as an Editorial Director at one of the UK’s leading children’s publishers. She was bitten by the travel bug at an early age while accompanying her parents on buying trips around the world for their oriental carpet business.

It was her love of travel that inspired her to set a novel in a hot, desert location (moving to freezing Ottawa, Canada, where her first winter hit -40 degrees C, might have had something to do with that, too). She studied Medieval and Old English literature at the University of Toronto. The sequel to The Oathbreaker’s Shadow, The Shadow’s Curse, is available now.

Kat Ellis lives in North Wales with her husband and their two cats.

When she isn't writing, she spends her time watching every horror movie under the sun and exploring the picturesque views and creepy ruins of the Welsh countryside.

Rachel Faturoti is a YA and children's fiction writer, editor, and poet with a passion for broadening the scope of authentic Black representation in YA and children's fiction. She believes it's important for readers to see themselves represented well in stories. Rachel's favourite books are Skellig, Coraline and A Monster Calls.

Kat Dunn grew up in London and has lived in Japan, Australia and France. She's written about mental health for Mind and The Guardian, worked as a translator for Japanese television and co-hosts the YA podcast YA OUGHTA! Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition. She lives in London.