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L. S. Matthews (born 29 August 1964) is the pen name of Laura Dron, a British children's author of several critically acclaimed novels.
She was born near Dudley in Worcestershire, (now West Midlands) in England, youngest of five children of parents from the South West who had moved to the industrial area for work. She attended state school there, leaving at 18 to study English literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she gained a first class honours degree.
Matthews lived and worked in London for six years and has also lived in Hull in Northern England, the West Midlands, Alsace in Northern France and Hertfordshire.
Matthews currently resides in Dorset with her husband and two children.
Her first novel, Fish (2003), won the Fidler Award and was also Highly Commended for the Branford Boase Award and nominated for a Carnegie Medal. Her other novels are The Outcasts (2004), A Dog For Life (2006), Lexi (2007) and After the Flood (2008). Matthews also wrote two short SEN titles, Deadly Night and The Game, which were both published in 2006.
All titles are published by Hodder & Stoughton.
Susan Mary Cooper is an English author of children's books. She is best known for The Dark Is Rising, a contemporary fantasy series set in England and Wales, which incorporates British mythology, such as the Arthurian legends, and Welsh folk heroes. For that work, in 2012 she won the lifetime Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association, recognizing her contribution to writing for teens. In the 1970s two of the five novels were named the year's best English-language book with an "authentic Welsh background" by the Welsh Books Council.
Dame Julia Mary Walters, known professionally as Julie Walters, is an English actress, comedian, and author. She is the recipient of four British Academy Television Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, two International Emmy Awards, a BAFTA Fellowship, and a Golden Globe. Walters has been nominated twice for an Academy Award, once for Best Actress and once for Best Supporting Actress.
Mary, Lady Stewart was a British novelist who developed the romantic mystery genre, featuring smart, adventurous heroines who could hold their own in dangerous situations. She also wrote children's books and poetry, but may be best known for her Merlin series, which straddles the boundary between the historical novel and fantasy.
Katharine Louise Mosse is an English novelist, non-fiction and short story writer and broadcaster. She is best known for her 2005 novel Labyrinth, which has been translated into more than 37 languages.
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson is a Chinese-born American writer best known for children's novels, including Bridge to Terabithia. For four different books published 1975-1980, she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of four people to win the two major international awards; for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998 and for her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2006, the biggest monetary prize in children's literature. Also for her body of work she was awarded the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in 2007 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the American Library Association in 2013. She was the second U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, serving 2010 and 2011.
Zadie Adeline Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
Elizabeth George Speare was an American writer of children's books, best known for historical novels including two Newbery Medal winners. She has been called one of America's 100 most popular writers for children and some of her work has become mandatory reading in many schools throughout the nation. Indeed, because her books have sold so well she is also cited as one of the Educational Paperback Association's top 100 authors.
Ann Philippa Pearce OBE was an English author of children's books. Her most famous work is the time-slip fantasy novel Tom's Midnight Garden, which won the 1958 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, as the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject. Pearce was a commended runner-up for the Medal a further four times.
Gillian Paton Walsh, Baroness Hemingford, was an English novelist and children's writer. She may be known best for her Booker prize-nominated novel Knowledge of Angels and the Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane mysteries that have completed and continued the work of Dorothy Sayers.
Deborah Moggach is an English novelist and screenwriter. She has written nineteen novels, including The Ex-Wives, Tulip Fever, These Foolish Things and Heartbreak Hotel.
Joolz Denby is a poet, novelist, artist and tattooist based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England.
Katharine Mary Briggs was a British folklorist and writer, who wrote The Anatomy of Puck, the four-volume A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, and various other books on fairies and folklore. From 1969 to 1972, she was president of the Folklore Society, which established an award in her name to commemorate her life and work.
Lakshmi Persaud is a Trinidad-born, British-based writer who resides in London, England. She is the author of five novels: Butterfly in the Wind (1990), Sastra (1993), For the Love of My Name (2000), Raise the Lanterns High (2004) and Daughters of Empire (2012).
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
Maggie Mary Gee is an English novelist. In 2012, she became a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Meg Rosoff is an American writer based in London, United Kingdom. She is best known for the novel How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Prize, Printz Award, and Branford Boase Award and made the Whitbread Awards shortlist. Her second novel, Just in Case, won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians recognising the year's best children's book published in the UK.
Nan Chauncy was a British-born Australian children's writer.
Grace Dent is an English columnist, broadcaster and author. She is a restaurant critic for The Guardian and from 2011 to 2017 wrote a restaurant column for the Evening Standard. She is a regular critic on the BBC's MasterChef UK and makes frequent appearances on Channel 4's television series Very British Problems.
Joan Margaret Phipson AM (1912–2003) was an Australian children's writer. She lived on a farm in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales and many of her books evoke the stress and satisfaction of living in the Australian countryside, floods, bushfires, drought and all. Two of her novels, Good Luck to the Rider and The Family Conspiracy, won the Australian Children's Book of the Year Award.
Mandy Theresa O'Loughlin, known professionally as Kit de Waal, is a British/Irish writer. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was published by Penguin Books in June 2016. After securing the publishing deal with Penguin, De Waal used some of her advance to set up the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Fellowship to help improve working-class representation in the arts. The audiobook version of My Name is Leon is voiced by Sir Lenny Henry. De Waal has also published several short stories.
