Nishani Reed is a children’s writer, rhymist and book-auntie. She lives in south Manchester with her husband, two children and an inconveniently large dog. Her debut picture book, Nabil Steals a Penguin, was longlisted for the 2024 Diverse Book Awards and the 2025 BookTrust Storytime Prize. Nishani also works in publishing as an IP lawyer and spends her time juggling work and family life in a way that rarely impresses anyone.
Junissa Bianda is an illustrator from Indonesia with a passion for art! Rarely do you see her without a coloured pencil and a sketchbook in her grasp. In the past, she proclaimed herself a professional scribbler, as she was known for scribbling on her friends’ school notebooks. Junissa has a graduate degree in Children’s Book Illustration from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, USA. She now lives in Indonesia with her mom, five siblings and two cats.
Jade was born in North Carolina and grew up in a tiny Michigan town. After an impassioned childhood spent drawing dragons and cat ladies, she traveled to SCAD Savannah to get a BFA in Illustration. In 2018, Jade left her job of 7 years as a staff children’s apparel artist to freelance full time. She currently lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband, greyhound, and 4 cats (including two naked ones!) When she’s not drawing, Jade can usually be found curled up with her cats and a really good book.
Stephanie Taylor is a British-born author of Jamaican heritage. Married to Michael, she has two amazing grown-up children, Sîan and Miles. Stephanie has worked in primary education for over 20 years at the same school in South East London.
Reading and writing books for children is Stephanie’s passion – if she can use this to encourage children to read then she feels like she has achieved something wonderful.
Nikita Gill is an Irish-Indian poet with a world-wide fan-base, who has the attention of over 650,000 Instagram followers for poetry collections and plays that offer a largely female readership the chance to recognise the value of their own experiences. She has given a TEDx Talk and spoken at every major literary festival in the U.K.. She has been shortlisted for the Goodreads Choice Award in poetry three times, nominated for the YOTO Carnegie Medal and has recently made her first foray into music having written for Anoushka Shankar’s Sister Susannah and In Her Name. She has written for or been featured in The New York Times, The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Stylist Magazine, The Bookseller, Cosmopolitan, The Times of India, Eastern Eye and many more. Gill has written seven collections of poetry, and a novel in verse which highlights Hindu mythology.
Chaaya Prabhat is an illustrator and lettering artist from Chennai, India, currently working out of Goa. She has worked on a number of picture books, including The Culture of Clothes (Templar Publishing), The Best Diwali Ever (Scholastic), Bracelets for Bina’s Brothers (Charlesbridge Publishing) and Hide-and-Seek History: The Egyptians (Little Tiger Publishing). She’s previously worked with several clients such as Penguin, Hachette, Facebook and Google on digital illustration projects. She has previously received awards for her portfolio and projects from Behance and Adobe.
Anja was born in the small coastal city of Rijeka, Croatia, where she currently lives and works as a full-time illustrator. After having studied animation in Zagreb, she got an MA in illustration at the University of the Arts London. She also works as an assistant lecturer in Illustration at the University of Applied Arts in Rijeka. Whimsical and peculiar stories and characters are a great source of inspiration to her, especially those from Slavic lore, as well as nature in general and its many storytelling qualities.
Jess loves all animals. She loves the natural world they live in, too. She thinks it is very important that we all work hard to protect the natural world, so she writes books about how we can do that. The books are mainly marketed at children, but Jess knows that it’s mostly the grown ups that need educating. She hopes that the wonderful children that read her books will be kind enough to educate the silly grown ups they meet about animals, the environment and what we can do to save them.
As well as writing, Jess works as a vet. She once ultrasounded a snow leopard and has also looked inside a crocodile’s stomach! She is sometimes seen on CBeebies talking about minibeasts and also works as a teacher for school groups that are interested in animals and the natural world.
Sol is a children’s book illustrator and graphic designer from Buenos Aires. Her illustrations are filled with details and beautiful colors focused on children’s products like books, puzzles, board books and memory games. Sol has worked for Airbnb, Pottery Barn Kids, Unicef and international magazines such as Oprah, Jamie Oliver, Wired and The Washington Post.
Carolina Búzio is an illustrator and occasional animator drawn to quirky characters and exciting colour combinations. She was born in the lovely seaside town of Porto, Portugal, and is currently living in artsy Berlin, Germany, with her partner (who is unfortunately allergic to cats or else she’d finally be the crazy cat lady her child-self always assumed she would one day be).
With a great memory for faces (but terrible for names, she apologises in advance) and objects with a personality, it makes sense that she illustrates children’s books for a living. The toughest but also her favourite part of the illustration process is the colouring stage: whenever she puts two odd colours together that go unexpectedly well, she gets butterflies in her stomach.
Barry grew up in Cornwall. He spent his early years mending pop-up books brought home from the library by his mum. Vast swathes of Sellotape were involved.
In the late 90s, Barry moved to London to study Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. By a twist of fate, he later secured an editorial job at Walker Books. He’s been editing children’s books ever since.
More recently, Barry has been writing picture books of his own. He loves the knotty puzzle of structuring a story over so few pages. Even better is the rush of excitement when a solution lands in the shower, or while walking the streets of South London. That’s a feeling worth its weight in gold.