Sabine Adeyinka

Sabine Adeyinka was born in England to a Nigerian dad and Jamaican mum. She grew up in Nigeria where she spent the most memorable time in boarding school from the age of eleven. As a young girl, she loved reading novels about boarding schools from around the world and longed to tell the stories of her own exciting experience. Sabine’s favourite pastime is writing stories about memories of the landscape, food and people of her childhood. She now lives in London with her husband and two children.

Chloë Perrin

CHLOË PERRIN is a North Walian writer who currently lives in West London studying Creative Writing at Brunel University.

They love to feed crows, prefers Halloween to Christmas and was frequently told off as a child for reading in class. Chloë has previously worked as a youth worker, drama tutor and professional storyteller, having always believed that the best way to teach anyone anything is through a story.

HIS ROYAL HOPELESS was longlisted for the 2019 Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Prize and is their debut novel.

Photography credit: Chloe Potamiti

 

Oli Hyatt & Anna Rainbow

ANNA RAINBOW grew up and still lives in North East England and works as a Clinical Psychologist with people with disabilities. Anna loves music and has always been in various choirs, singing quartets, bands, and orchestras. In 2015 she was shortlisted for the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition which led to Chicken House publishing The Fandom, her series for young adults (as Anna Day) – it sold in 24 territories and was optioned for TV development by Fox. This is her debut middle-grade novel.

OLI HYATT is based in Kings Sutton and is the co-founder of BAFTA award-winning animation studio Blue Zoo. He is also the Director of Alphablocks Limited, the company behind the popular CBeebies phonics shows, Alphablocks and Numberblocks. He is also the chair of Animation UK and was awarded an MBE for his services to the animation industry. This is Oli’s debut novel.

Antigua de Fortune of the High Seas is Oli and Anna's first co-authored book together.

Sarah Horne

Sarah Horne learnt to draw whilst trying to explain her reasoning for an elaborate haircut at the age of nine. 

An illustrator for over fifteen years, she started her Illustration career working freelance for newspapers such as The Guardian, The Independent On Sunday and Print Week. She also worked on commissions for advertising clients such as Nike, IKEA and Kew Gardens.

In 2010, Sarah published Paws, Claws and Frilly Drawers and Tantrums And Tiaras her first Author/ Illustrator young fiction titles with Stripes.   

Sarah has since illustrated many funny young fiction titles, including the Fizzlebert Stump series by A.F Harrold (Bloomsbury), Llama United by Scott Allen (Pan Macmillan) and Ask Oscar by Alan MacDonald (Egmont). Panda at the Door is her first book with Chicken House.

She loves to include detail and extra visual narratives in her work. She works traditionally with a dip pen and Indian ink, and finishes the work digitally. When not at her desk, Sarah loves running, painting, photography, cooking, film, and a good stomp up a hill.

Image credit: Hazel Thompson

Richard Pickard

Tom Ellen

Tom Ellen is the co-author of three critically acclaimed Young Adult novels from Chicken House - Lobsters (2014, which was shortlisted for The Bookseller's inaugural YA Book Prize), Never Ends (2016) and Freshers (2017, nominated for the 2018 Carnegie Medal). The books have been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide.

Tom's debut adult novel All About Us from HQ/HarperCollins was published in October 2020, with the follow-up due out in early 2022.

His debut Middle Grade book, The Cartoons that Came to Life, comes out with Chicken House in 2021.

Tom also works as a journalist and has written for publications such as Empire, Glamour, Evening Standard Magazine, NME, Cosmopolitan, ShortList, Vice, Time Out, Stylist and many more. He is a longstanding contributor to Viz comic, and has written TV, radio and online comedy material for XFM, ESPN and The Daily Mash.

Angharad Walker

Angharad Walker grew up on military bases in the UK, Germany and Cyprus, where stories were often being told about far-flung places, past conflicts, and friends and family.

She studied English Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and the University of California Irvine. Her fiction has been published in Structo and A Million Ways, and her poetry has made it into Agenda broadsheets and Ink Sweat & Tears.

She lives in South London. When she’s not writing, she works as a communications consultant for charities and not-for-profits.

Efua Traoré

 

Efua Traoré is a Nigerian-German author who grew up in a small town in Nigeria. For as long as she can remember, her head was filled with little stories, but it was not until much later that she began to write them down.

Apart from Nigeria, she has also lived in France and Germany and she writes in English and in German. If she had her way, she would travel much more and write every single day.

Efua won the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa with her short story ‘True Happiness’ and she is a literature grant holder of the Munich Literaturreferat. Children of the Quicksands is her debut novel which won the Times / Chicken House Prize in 2019.

She lives in Munich with her husband and three daughters.

Photo credit belongs to Boubacar Traoré.

 

Naomi Gibson

Naomi Gibson was born in 1988 and grew up in Cheshire, UK. Her childhood was spent with her nose in a book and her hands on a sketchpad, constantly in search of adventure and new worlds. Encouraged by her family to be creative, she developed a love for writing at a young age – something that never left her. She studied Art History at the University of Manchester. Whilst there, she met her husband, someone who continues to tell her all about the latest advancements in AI, space, and consumer technology, even when she’s not listening. Every Line of You is her first novel, and proof she does in fact listen to her husband.

Melissa Harrison

Melissa Harrison is an award-winning novelist and nature writer who lives in Suffolk. Her novel All Among the Barley (2018) won the European Union Prize for Literature. At Hawthorn Time (2015) was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, while Clay (2013), won the Portsmouth First Fiction award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year. Her non-fiction book Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (2016) was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, and she was Series Editor on four anthologies of writing about the seasons, published in 2016 in support of The Wildlife Trusts.

Melissa contributes a monthly Nature Notebook column to The Times and is the writer and presenter of the hit nature podcast ‘The Stubborn Light of Things’. She has appeared on Springwatch and Springwatch Unsprung, and speaks regularly on the radio.

Christopher Edge

Christopher Edge is the award-winning author of a number of children’s books, including The Many Worlds of Albie Bright, which was nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. Christopher grew up in Manchester, where he spent most of his childhood in the local library dreaming up stories, but now lives in Gloucestershire, where he spends most of his time in the local library dreaming up stories.

Amy Bond

Amy Bond is an Irish writer living in Dublin. Her passion for reading led her to study English Literature at university, followed by a Masters in Library and Information Science, and she now works as a librarian.

Karl Olsberg

Olsberg lives in Germany and has written over 50 thrillers, novels and children’s books. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on artificial intelligence and has founded multiple award-winning start-up companies. Boy in a White Room was nominated for Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2018, Germany’s most prestigious youth fiction award.

Stephan Lee

Stephan Lee is a YA enthusiast, ardent K-Pop fan and journalist. He currently works as an Associate Director at Bustle after a five-year stretch at Entertainment Weekly. At EW, he wrote features and reviews and once traveled to Seoul to write a feature about Korean entertainment's world domination. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and is also working on his debut novel for adults.

Janae Marks

​​Janae Marks has an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Writing for Children from The New School. She grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and now lives in Connecticut with her husband and daughter. The Faraway Truth is her debut novel.

Trudi Tweedie

Trudi Tweedie studied economics at Manchester before ending up in Edinburgh, researching beer for Heineken. She later relocated to beautiful Aberdeenshire, where she now lives with her husband and two kids. The Pure Heart, her debut novel, won the 2018 Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition.

Holly Rivers

Holly grew up in a real-life children’s book, playing the part of Drusilla in ITV’s The Worst Witch alongside Felicity Jones. She spent her childhood in Wales, wishing that she was Pippi Longstocking, and after graduating spent time working as an actor, broadcaster and cheese-seller, until one day she had the idea to pen a story about a tenacious young inventor named Demelza. Holly's days are now spent penning new stories as well as leading drama, craft and bushcraft classes for children. She lives in Brighton with her girlfriend and still wishes that she was Pippi Longstocking.

Mikki Lish & Kelly Ngai

Australian co-authors Mikki Lish and Kelly Ngai create worlds together, even though they don’t live on the same continent. This means that when they video call each other, it’s not unusual for someone to be in pyjamas.

Mikki has worked with many musicians and actors and now lives in America with her husband, dog and cats.

Kelly lives in Australia with her two sons and loves waking up to the wild story ideas that Mikki has sent during the night.

The House on Hoarder Hill is their second collaboration and is being developed for television with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House and Wiip.

Jenni Hendriks & Ted Caplan

JENNI HENDRIKS’s mom often complained she was 'a real smartass', so she decided to make a career out of it. She moved to Hollywood and worked her way from coffee-fetcher to writer for the television series How I Met Your Mother. She is also a cartoonist whose feminist-inspired works have been published in Ms. magazine. A film school graduate, she knows how to rack focus and wrangle a cable and can tell you what a best boy does.

TED CAPLAN has been working in the film industry for over twenty years as a writer, sound designer, and music editor. He has helped craft the soundtracks to many high-profile projects, such as The Maze Runner, Logan, both Deadpool films, and The Hate U Give. He is also the screenwriter of Love Sonia, a feature film about international sex trafficking from the producers of Life of Pi and Slumdog Millionaire.

Ben Oliver

Ben Oliver began writing creatively at age seven, and was promptly placed into the lowest reading and writing group at school. Frustrated by his lack of immediate success, Ben chose to step-down from the world of writing.

Three years later, he came out of retirement to write a 'What I Did During My Summer Holiday' assignment, where he claimed he saved the world from the apocalypse. Encouraged by an enthusiastic teacher, Ben returned, triumphantly, to writing.

A mere twenty-two years later, and now a high school English teacher, Ben’s first novel, The Loop, is scheduled to be published in 2020.