Haunted

Susan Cooper is the author of the classic five-book sequence The Dark is Rising, which won a Newbery Medal, a Newbery Honor Award, and two Carnegie Honor Awards. Born in England, she was a reporter and feature writer for the London Sunday Times before coming to live in the United States. Her writing includes books for children and adults, a Broadway play, films, and Emmy-nominated screenplays. Her books for children are King of Shadows and Victory, and for adults a portrait of Revels founder Jack Langstaff called The Magic Maker. Susan lives and writes in Marshfield, Massachusetts.

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.

Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie, India, to an Indian father and an English mother. The family settled in England where Jamila completed her schooling, studied music, worked for the BBC and became a mother of two. She began writing to reflect the multicultural world in which she and her children lived.

Her first book, The Magic Orange Tree was published in 1979. Other publications include: Grandpa Chatterji (shortlisted for the Smarties Award and dramatised for Channel 4 schools TV); and The Wheel of Surya (1992 Guardian Children’s Fiction Award runner-up). Her novel for young adults, Coram Boy, was published to critical acclaim in 2000 and won the Children’s Whitbread Award. She has also published a collection of brand new fairy tales, Blackberry Blue. Jamila lives in Gloucestershire.

Matt Haig was BookTrust's eighth online Writer in Residence. His first novel for young readers, Shadow Forest, won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award and the Gold Smarties Award. He is also the author of various adult novels, including the bestsellers The Last Family in England and The Radleys. Reviewers have called his writing 'totally engrossing', 'touching, quirky and macabre' and 'so surprising and strange that it vaults into a realm all of its own'. His books have been translated into 25 languages. He lives in York.

Robin Jarvis is a British Young-Adult fiction (YA) and children's novelist, who writes dark fantasy, suspense and supernatural thrillers.

His books for Young Adults have featured the inhabitants of a coastal town battling a monumental malevolence with the help of its last supernatural guardian (The Witching Legacy), a diminutive race of shape shifters pitched against the evil might of the faerie hordes (The Hagwood Trilogy), a sinister "world-switching" dystopian future, triggered by a sinister and hypnotic book (Dancing Jax), Norse Fates, Glastonbury crow-demons and a time travelling, wise-cracking teddy bear (The Wyrd Museum series), dark powers, a forgotten race and ancient evils on the North Yorkshire coast (The Whitby Witches trilogy), epic medieval adventure (The Oaken Throne) and science-fiction dramatising the "nefarious intrigue" within an alternate Tudor realm, peopled by personalities of the time, automata servants and animals known as Mechanicals and ruled by Queen Elizabeth I. (Deathscent).

Before writing his children's story about a sharply-dressed skeleton detective, Derek Landy wrote the screenplays for a zombie movie and a murderous thriller in which everybody dies.

As a black belt in Kenpo Karate he has taught countless children how to defend themselves, in the hopes of building his own private munchkin army. He firmly believes that they await his call to strike against his enemies (he doesn't actually have any enemies, but he's assuming they'll show up, sooner or later).

Derek lives on the outskirts of Dublin, and the reason he writes his own biography blurb is so that he can finally refer to himself in the third person without looking pompous or insane.

Mal Peet grew up in a council estate in north Norfolk in a family that he describes as 'emotionally impaired'. He attended the Paston School and studied English and American Studies at the University of Warwick, after which he worked at a variety of jobs before becoming a novelist at a relatively late age. He lives in Devon with his wife, Elspeth Graham, and has three children.

His first novel, Keeper (2003), won the Branford Boase Award. His second, Tamar (2005), won the 2005 Carnegie Medal. In 2007 he published The Penalty, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Book Trust Teenage Prize. He won the 2009 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize with Exposure (2008), a modern re-telling of Shakespeare's Othello. Cloud Tea Monkeys (2010), a children's picture book written in conjunction with his wife and illustrated by Juan Wijngaard, is a modern folktale set in India. He has also written Life: An Exploded Diagram (2011).

Philip Reeve was born and raised in Brighton, where he wrote his first story at the tender age of five about a spaceman called Spike and his dog Spook. He is a talented illustrator and writer, and he has illustrated several titles in the Horrible Histories series. Philip is best known for his multi award-winning Mortal Engines quartet, which won the Nestlé Children's Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award, and the Guardian Children's Book Award. Philip has also won the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal with Here Lies Arthur.