Malorie Blackman (Author) After leaving school Malorie Blackman studied computer science and after ten years working in that profession she decided she'd had enough of bits, bytes and debugging and had found something she wanted to do more - writing! Malorie joined writing classes at the City Lit and spent every spare moment writing, writing and writing. Eighty-two rejection slips later she had her first short story accepted for publication. Malorie cites one of her reasons for writing as the fact that there are so few books featuring a black child as the main character - she wanted to redress the balance and has been doing so ever since. For Orchard Books, Malorie has written Elaine, You're a Brat and the Puzzle Planet series of books in the Super Crunchie range. Malorie's first full-length novel Hacker (Corgi) won WH Smith's Mind Boggling Books Award in 1994 and since then her writing has gone from strength-to-strength. Joanne Partis (Illustrator) Joanne's love of drawing and painting led her to study Illustration at Loughborough College of Art and Design where she also met her husband. They now live in sunny west Sussex with their three children and two cats, Alf and Bert.