Patrick Ness is the award-winning and bestselling author of the Chaos Walking trilogy, A Monster Calls, More Than This, The Rest of Us Just Live Here and Release. John Green has described him as "an insanely beautiful writer". He has won every major prize in children's fiction, including the Carnegie Medal twice.

He has written the screenplay for the film of A Monster Calls and the BBC Doctor Who spin-off, Class. The first Chaos Walking film is slated for release in 2019. He lives in London.

Siobhan Dowd lived in Oxford with her husband, Geoff, before tragically dying from cancer in August 2007, aged 47. She was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary person.

Siobhan's first novel, A Swift Pure Cry, won the Branford Boase Award and the Eilis Dillon Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and Booktrust Teenage Prize.

Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, won the 2007 NASEN & TES Special Educational Needs Children's Book Award. In March 2008, the book was shortlisted for the prestigious Children's Books Ireland Bisto Awards.

Siobhan's third novel, Bog Child, was the first book to be posthumously awarded the Carnegie Medal in 2008.

The award-winning novel A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness was based on an idea of Siobhan's. Her novella, The Ransom of Dond, was published in 2013, illustrated throughout by Pam Smy.