Once told by poet Ted Hughes her writing was "dangerous," it took Emma Carroll twenty years of English teaching and a life-changing cancer diagnosis to feel brave enough to give her dream of being an author a try. Now she is the bestselling author and was called the "Queen of Historical Fiction" by BookTrust. She has been nominated for and the winner of numerous national, regional and schools awards - including the Books Are My Bag Readers' Award, Branford Boase, CILIP Carnegie Medal, Young Quills, Teach Primary, and the Waterstones Book Prize. Emma's home is in the Somerset hills with her husband and two terriers. She still can't believe her luck that she gets to write dangerous books for a living. Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but when the Nazis came to power her family fled to England and she was sent to boarding school. She became a writer while bringing up her four children, and her bestselling novels have been published around the world. Journey to the River Sea won the Smarties Gold Medal and was shortlisted for both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

Some of her other young fiction titles include The Secret of Platform 13, Which Witch? and The Great Ghost Rescue. Eva died peacefully in October 2010 at the age of eighty-five.