At age sixteen Janeen Brian trained as a primary teacher and at eighteen stood in front of her first class of year five students. Her teaching career saw her work in junior primary, primary, drama and as a teacher-librarian.

While raising a family, she began a four-year career with a professional children’s theatre company, both acting and writing. She has also been involved in over 100 television and radio commercials as well as dozens of voiceovers for radio and video. She began dabbling in writing in her thirties.

Since then she has written over 100 books both in trade and education, and in genres ranging from picture books to poetry, short fiction, nonfiction and novels. Janeen is an award-winning author and poet and many of her books have been translated and published overseas.

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.