Clare is a UK-based illustrator, who graduated from art school in 2009 and has been working as a freelance illustrator ever since! Clare works on a big variety of fun projects, creating pictures and patterns for home products, stationery, story books, magazines and packaging. All influenced by her love of colour, nature and mid-century design.
Originally from Cornwall, she now lives in Bristol with her boyfriend and two cats.
Born and raised in London, England, Rachel works at multi-award-winning independent children’s publisher, Nosy Crow, and is both the publisher across the business as well as the author of the award-winning Making a Baby and its follow-up, Growing Up.
Her goal in life is to write and publish books that educate, inform and inspire a love of reading, because by building more empathetic, honest and open readers, she genuinely believes we can build a better world.
Alongside his novels FloodWorld and DustRoad and his animal-rescue series for younger readers, Cosmic Creatures, Tom Huddleston has written for the official Star Wars: Adventures in Wild Space saga and the Warhammer Adventures series for Games Workshop. He is also a musician and film journalist. He enjoys outdoor swimming, chewy sweets and watching too many movies.
Sophy Williams is an award-winning illustrator with twenty-five years experience illustrating children’s books. While still studying, she twice won prizes in the Readers Digest Young Illustrator’s competition and was runner up for the Mother Goose Award for her first picture book. She spent some of her childhood in exotic locations such as Singapore, Hong Kong and the Middle East and often finds her illustrations being influenced by these places. Her pictures are filled with atmosphere and drama created with soft pastels. She now lives by the Kennet and Avon canal in Bradford on Avon with her husband, author/illustrator MP Robertson, their two lanky teenage sons and a mischievous grey cat called Hamish. When not illustrating she sings and performs in a choir, grows fruit and veg on her allotment and drinks lots coffee with her friends.
Anne-Kathrin Behl, born in 1983, has illustrated and written many children’s books since 2009. With her mother having a bookstore, she has always loved children’s books and, as soon as she could draw and write, Anne made her own little books and wished to become a professional children’s book illustrator. She studied Illustration at the HAW in Hamburg and later moved to Celle, a little town in northern Germany, where she now lives with her husband and her two sons.
Carlie Sorosiak lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and her American Dingo, Dany. A bestselling children’s author, her fiction titles include Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month, I, Cosmo, as well as My Life as a Cat, Always, Clementine and Shadow Fox. She has a master’s in English from Oxford University and another in publishing from City, University of London, and she currently volunteers at a cat shelter (just don’t tell Dany!). She is the author of A World of Dogs and its follow-up A World of Cats.
Luisa Uribe is an illustrator and designer of children’s media. She graduated as a Graphic Designer from the National University of Colombia and has an MA in Art and Design from Loughborough University. In 2018 she was awarded the SOI Dilys Evans Founder’s Award for The Vast Wonder of the World. Other recent publications include Your Name is a Song, My Town/Mi Pueblo and My Brother Is Away. She lives in Bogotá, Colombia with her partner and two cats.
Penelope Dullaghan grew up playing outside, swimming in lakes and drawing pictures. She still loves all those things today, and now it’s her job to make pictures! When she’s not working in her home studio, she’s usually homeschooling her daughter (who wants to be an artist when she grows up, too), going camping in the woods or trying to get things to grow in her garden. Her website and blog can be found at www.penelopedullaghan.com.
Kieran Larwood was born in Kenya. He moved to the UK when he was 2 and lived in various places before settling on the Isle of Wight where he can still be found: exploring rockpools, climbing trees and writing – slowly disappearing behind a mountain of notebooks and empty coffee mugs. He taught Reception class in a primary school for fifteen years before becoming a full-time author.
Kieran’s books have won several awards, including the Blue Peter Best Story and the Prix Sorcières.
He is inspired by a life-long love of fantasy stories, which all began when – as a young boy – he picked up a copy of The Hobbit and saw the map inside. It just goes to show – you never know where opening a book will lead…
Joe Todd-Stanton grew up in Brighton, England, and was taught to draw by his mother, who is also an illustrator. He studied at UWE Bristol, receiving a first class degree in Illustration. Todd-Stanton has been commissioned to work for clients such as Oxford University Press, Usborne Publishing, and Aquila magazine. His work has been highly
praised and his book The Secret of Black Rock was longlisted for The C ILIP Kate Greenaway Medal 2018 and won a 2018 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.
Isabelle Follath is a freelance illustrator living in Zurich, Switzerland with her husband and daughter, where she creates pictures for books and many other things. She loves drawing all sorts of characters, mixing colours and drinking an alarming amount of coffee. When she is not illustrating you can find her searching for the perfect vintage nib or trying rearrange her watercolours of which she has far too many.
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.