Narinder Dhami (born 1958 in Wolverhampton) is a British children's author.
Dhami's father was an Indian immigrant from the Punjab who arrived in the UK in 1954, and her mother is English. [1] She grew up in a multi-cultural environment, with Asian Indian and western cultures both major influences in her life, and was educated at Wolverhampton Girls' High School and then Birmingham University, where she graduated in 1980.
Dhami started working as a teacher, and for the next nine years she taught in primary and secondary schools in Essex and in the London borough of Waltham Forest. During this time, she began writing stories for teenage magazines, and contributed many photo-stories to the now-defunct Jackie magazine, published by DC Thomson.
Eventually she gave up teaching for a full-time writing job. For the last few years, she has been writing contemporary realistic fiction about children growing up in Britain. Her Babes quartet about three British Asian girls is extremely popular with girls between 9 and 14 years of age. She writes a wide range of children's books for pre-teens on other subjects and now increasingly for older teens too. Her characters reflect the British urban ethnic mix.
Books for 2009 included a teen thriller Bang, Bang You're Dead! May 2009, which won or was shortlisted for a large number of book awards in 2010, and the first book in a series of six for 9+ readers called The Beautiful Game about girls' football. A further four books in the series were published in 2010 and the last of the six appeared in Jan 2011.
Dhami is one of the authors of the internationally successful Rainbow Magic series, written under the name of Daisy Meadows. Her most famous and biggest selling book was Bend It Like Beckham, a novelisation of the film.
Now she lives in Shropshire with her husband and her cats, continuing her writing career. A book that came out in March 2015 is a thriller for 9-13 year olds called 'Thirteen Hours', It was published by Random House. [1]
Around 300 books published to date. Key titles include the following:
All books published by Random House unless otherwise specified.
Victoria Caroline Beckham is an English fashion designer, singer, and television personality. She rose to prominence in the 1990s as a member of the girl group the Spice Girls, in which she was nicknamed Posh Spice. With over 100 million records sold worldwide, the group became the best-selling female group of all time. After the Spice Girls split in 2001, Beckham was signed to Virgin Records, in which she released her self-titled debut solo album, which produced two UK Top 10 singles.
Bend It Like Beckham is a 2002 sports comedy-drama film directed by Gurinder Chadha from a screenplay by Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges, and Guljit Bindra. The film stars Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Anupam Kher, Juliet Stevenson, Shaznay Lewis and Archie Panjabi. In Bend It Like Beckham, Jesminder Bhamra (Nagra) and Jules Paxton (Knightley) chase careers in professional football despite their parents' wishes.
Meera Syal FRSL is an English comedian, writer, playwright, singer, journalist and actress. She rose to prominence as one of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and by portraying Sanjeev's grandmother, Ummi, in The Kumars at No. 42. She became one of the UK's best-known Asian personalities.
Meg Tilly is a Canadian-American actress and writer.
"The Elves and The Shoemaker" is a set of fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm about a poor shoemaker who receives much-needed help from three young helpful elves.
Malorie Blackman is a British writer who held the position of Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She primarily writes literature and television drama for children and young adults. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues, for example, her Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional alternative Britain to explore racism. Blackman has been the recipient of many honours for her work, including the 2022 PEN Pinter Prize.
Adeline Yen Mah (馬嚴君玲) is a Chinese-American author and physician. She grew up in Tianjin, Shanghai and Hong Kong, and is known for her autobiography Falling Leaves. She is married to Professor Robert A. Mah, with whom she has a daughter, and a son from a previous marriage.
Paul Stewart is a writer of children's books, best known for three series written in collaboration with the illustrator Chris Riddell: The Edge Chronicles, the Free Lance novels, and the Far Flung Adventures series.
Parminder Kaur Nagra is a British actress. She is known for portraying Jess Bhamra in the film Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Dr. Neela Rasgotra in the NBC medical drama ER (2003–2009). Her other television roles include Meera Malik in the first season of the NBC crime drama The Blacklist (2013–2014) and a recurring role in the ABC/Marvel series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2016–2017) as Ellen Nadeer for season four. More recently, Nagra has starred as the titular character of the ITV series DI Ray (2022).
Lisa Unger is an American author of contemporary fiction, primarily psychological thrillers.
Sophie Hannah is a British poet and novelist.
The English Roses is a children's picture book written by American entertainer Madonna, released on September 15, 2003, by Callaway Arts & Entertainment. Jeffrey Fulvimari illustrated the book with line drawings. A moral tale, it tells the story of four friends who are jealous of a girl called Binah. However, they come to know that Binah's life is not easy and decide to include her in their group.
Jennifer Donnelly is an American writer best known for the young adult historical novel A Northern Light.
Berlie Doherty is an English novelist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. She is best known for children's books, for which she has twice won the Carnegie Medal. She has also written novels for adults, plays for theatre and radio, television series and libretti for children's opera.
Catherine MacPhail was a Scottish-born author. Although she had had other jobs, she always wanted to be a writer but she didn't think she would be suited to it. Her first published work was a sort of "twist-in-the-tale" story in Titbits, followed by a story in the Sunday Post. After she had won a romantic story competition in Woman's Weekly, she decided to concentrate on romantic novels, but after writing two, she decided that it wasn't right for her. In addition to writing books for children around their teens, she also wrote for adults, she is the author of the BBC Radio 2 series, My Mammy And Me.
Grace Dent is a British 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 has appeared on Channel 4's television series Very British Problems.
Dangerous Girls is the first novel in the Dangerous Girls duology by R. L. Stine. First published in 2003, the novel was followed by a sequel, The Taste of Night, in 2004. Dangerous Girls has won awards, including the ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers and the New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age.
Livi Michael, also known as Olivia Michael, UK, is a British fiction writer who publishes children and adult novels.
Louisa Young is a British novelist, songwriter, short-story writer, biographer and journalist, whose work has appeared in 32 languages. By 2023 she had published seven novels under her own name and five with her daughter, the actor Isabel Adomakoh Young, under the pen name Zizou Corder. Her eleventh novel, Devotion, appeared in June 2016. She has also written three non-fiction books, The Book of the Heart and A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Her memoir, You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol, is an account of her relationship with the composer Robert Lockhart and of his alcoholism. Her most recent novel, Twelve Months and a Day, was published in June 2022 in the UK, and in the US in January 2023 (Putnam).
Carrie Hope Fletcher is an English West End theatre actress. Her performances include the roles of Éponine and Fantine in Les Misérables, Carrie has also starred in the original British production of Heathers: The Musical and she originated the role of Cinderella in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella. Outside of her theatre work, Carrie has a large social media following with over half a million subscribers on YouTube. As well as this, she has written several bestselling novels for children and adults.