Nina Bawden was one of the UK's best writers for both adults and children. She often used her own childhood experiences in her books - Carrie's War is set in the mining valley in Wales where she lived as an evacuee in wartime. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford and finished her first novel the year after she took her degree. She won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for The Peppermint Pig. Nina died in 2012, aged 87.