Mark MacLeod has worked in almost every possible area of books for children: as a bookseller, editor, Publishing Director for Random House and for Dirt Lane Press, Publisher at Hachette Australia and as publisher under his own name imprint, Mark Macleod Books.

Mark has won awards for distinguished service to Children’s Literature, and for many titles he has published, and is himself the author of several books, has been National President of the Children’s Book Council of Australia, a television and radio presenter and a senior academic.

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

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. Her work has been published in the US and UK, and translated into more than twenty languages. Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia with a cat the size of a walrus.