Judith Rossell is the multi-award-winning author-illustrator of the bestselling Stella Montgomery series (Withering-by-Sea, Wormwood Mire, A Garden of Lilies and the upcoming Wakestone Hall).

Before beginning her career in children's books, Judith worked as a government scientist (not a mad scientist, a normal kind of scientist) and also for a cotton-spinning company (that made threads for T-shirts and denim jeans and mops and teabag strings).

Judith has written thirteen books and illustrated more than eighty, and her work has been published in the US, UK and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia with a cat the size of a walrus.