Richard Platt is the author of Pirate Diary, which won the Kate Greenaway Medal, the Silver Smarties Book Prize and the Blue PeterAward for Best Factual Book, and Castle Diary, which was Highly Commended for the Kate Greenaway Medal and shortlisted for the Kurt Maschler Award.

He has written over 70 books and has appeared widely on TV and radio, talking about his children's writing. He lives in Kent.

Anthony McGowan is the author of many critically acclaimed YA novels including Hellbent, Henry Tumour and The Knife That Killed Me, the last of which has been released as a film.

He won the 2006 BookTrust Teenage Prize, the 2007 Catalyst Award and has been shortlisted for a raft of other major children’s literature prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for Rook in 2018.

Gillian Cross is perhaps best known for her Demon Headmaster series and its BBC adaptation.

She has won many of the most prestigious awards for children’s fiction, including the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award and the Smarties Prize.

She lives near Coventry with her husband.

Sean Callery originally trained and worked as a journalist before he became a primary school teacher.

He writes both fiction and nonfiction and has written over sixty books for children. He has a particular passion for history and has a knack for mining little tantalising nuggets of information that you might have missed before.