Biographical note

I write short books for short children and longer books for longer people. I've been writing fiction and non-fiction for young people, and non-fiction since the last millennium - luckily, the end of the last millennium and I'm not even nearly 1000 years old. I particularly enjoy reading and writing stories with a bit of a twist and, for older readers, an element of horror. I definitely have a Gothic streak. Writers I really admire include Minnie Gray, Oliver Jeffers, Shaun Tan, Edward Gorey, Tove Jansson, Marcus Sedgwick, Siobhan Dowd and Melvin Burgess. I love being a writer because (a) it gives me the chance to be enthusiastic about things and share my enthusiasm with other people (b) I get paid for telling lies and (c) I don't have to do as I'm told, unlike people with a real job. I like to listen to music when I'm writing, and usually pick a few pieces of music that go with each book and listen to them again and again - most of them are opera. Although I spend most of my time writing, I also spend some helping other people with their own writing - mostly young people, who are doing a degree at university. This is great fun as I get to read lots of stories by writers who are just starting. I live in Cambridge, which is a very ancient city in the east of England with lots of ornate and pointy buildings. It's very flat in Cambridge, so it's easy to go everywhere by bicycle, but it's also rather wet. If I could live anywhere at all, it would probably be in Venice, which is also flat, ancient and full of pointy buildings. It's even wetter than Cambridge, and people go everywhere by boat. Sarah Ridley has an enduring interest in history, the natural world and many other topics, which has made her work as an editor and writer of children's information books endlessly fascinating. Some of her books have been shortlisted or longlisted for information book awards, including Dear Jelly: Family Letters from the First World War and Suffragettes and the Fight for the Vote. Sarah lives in Colchester with her husband and her student daughter's guinea pigs. Ryan Wheatcroft was born and raised in Sheffield, where he still lives on the outskirts of the city. He spent his childhood making books in old ring binders with borrowed fax machine paper, which began his love for telling stories with words and pictures. The interest in storytelling continued to grow and driven by his passion for illustration and design (especially from the early and middle parts of the last century) he went on to study illustration at the University of Lincoln. Since graduating in 2014 he has worked as an illustrator and he now spends most of his time making pictures for books and magazines.