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Authors beginning with: H

A.F. Harrold

A.F. Harrold is a performance poet based in Reading. He was Glastonbury Festival website's Poet in Residence in 2008, and Poet in Residence at Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2010. He is active in schools work, running workshops and slams and doing performances at ungodly hours of the morning, and has published several collections of poetry. He is the owner of many books, a handful of hats, a few good ideas and one beard.

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz is a screenwriter and children's novelist. Born in 1955 in North London, he was educated at Rugby School and York University, and published his first book, Enter Frederick K Bower, in 1978.

He created the television series Foyle's War, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders, Crime Traveller and Menace, and has written episodes for many more, including Agatha Christie's Poirot, Murder Most Horrid and Robin of Sherwood. He has also written a horror film, The Gathering, starring Christina Ricci.

His books for children include the Alex Rider series about the teenage secret agent. There are nine books in the series including Snakehead (2007), shortlisted for the 2008 Book Trust Teenage Prize. He has also written The Power of Five series, Diamond Brothers series of mystery stories and the Groosham Grange series.

Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is an American writer. A long-time columnist for the Miami Herald and Tribune Content Agency, Hiaasen has also written more than 20 novels which can generally be classified as humorous crime fiction and often feature themes of environmentalism and political corruption in his native Florida.

Caryl Hart

Caryl Hart writes picture books and young fiction and loves walking her dog and sitting in cafes and libraries. She runs creative literacy workshops for schools and libraries.

Cora Harrison

Cora Harrison taught primary school children for 25 years before moving to Kilfenora, County Clare, to live on a small farm where there used to be an Iron-age fort. She has written more than 25 books for children including The London Murder Mysteries series, the Burren Mysteries series, I Was Jane Austen's Best Friend and Debutantes. My Lady Judge was her first book in a Celtic historical crime series for adults.

Charlie Higson

Charlie Higson is the author of the phenomenally successful Young Bond and The Enemy series. Charlie is a man of many talents. He is a successful actor, comedian and writer for television and radio, but has been writing books for children since 2005.

After studying at the University of East Anglia, Charlie formed a band, The Higsons. He then became a decorator before turning to the world of television and going into partnership with his friend Paul Whitehouse. His successes include Saturday Live, the Harry Enfield Television Programme, The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, Shooting Stars, Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, the film Suite 16, Swiss Toni and of course, the Fast Show. He lives in London with his wife and three sons.

Chris Haughton

Chris Haughton is an Irish illustrator living in London. He illustrates regularly for the Guardian and other publications. He has worked for several large national and international advertising campaigns, and created murals in London, Dublin and Tokyo. He was listed in Time magazine's 'DESIGN 100' for the work he has been doing for Fair Trade clothing company People Tree. A Bit Lost (Walker Books) is his debut picture book.

He received a Best New Illustrators Award in 2011.

Chris Higgins

Chris Higgins has written many books for young people - selling 120,000 copies of her books in the UK alone. An ex-teacher, Chris is married with four daughters and three grandchildren, and lives in West Cornwall. The Secrets Club is her first fiction series for Puffin.

Christopher William Hill

Christopher William Hill is an award-winning playwright and radio dramatist. His plays for young people have been performed in the UK and internationally.

Debbie Harter

Debbie Harter has participated in all kinds of artistic ventures, creating jewellery, textiles, ceramics, mirrors and candles. Now Debbie works primarily in book illustration, and with her bold and vibrant style, has created many successful titles, including Herb, the Vegetarian Dragon, The Animal Boogie and the best-selling Bear series. Debbie currently lives in Falmouth, Cornwall.

Dianne Hofmeyr

Dianne grew up on the tip of southern Africa. Her acclaimed picture books include The Magic Bojabi Tree, which was nominated for the 2014 Kate Greenaway Award and Zeraffa Giraffa, which is on The Sunday Times' Top 100 Children's Classics list. Dianne lives in west London. 

Douglas Holgate

Douglas Holgate has been a freelance comic book artist and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia, for more than 10 years. He's illustrated books for publishers such as HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster, including the Planet Tad series, Cheesie Mack, Case File 13, and Zoo Sleepover. Douglas has illustrated comics for Image, Dynamite, Abrams, and Penguin Random House. He's currently working on the self-published series Maralinga, which received grant funding from the Australian Society of Authors and the Victorian Council for the Arts, as well as the all-ages graphic novel Clem Hetherington and the Ironwood Race, published by Scholastic Graphix, both co-created with writer Jen Breach.

Emily Hughes

Emily Hughes likes to walk outside. When she draws and writes she doesn't want to tell children things plainly — she believes children can discover it themselves. Using three aids she tries to help children understand her stories. One is through environment; using something natural is comforting and familiar. Also, green is a special colour, and joyful to use. Another is through feeling, which is harder to set; she tries to do this by using expression, body language and colour. The most exciting is in details.

She finds that children often see things that adults can't. She wants children to feel  powerful by what they notice. These are gifts made for the observant. She make books for all children, but perhaps she is making books for the child she was. Emily is of Hawaiian heritage and lives in London.

Eric Hill

Eric Hill (1927-2014) started his artistic career as an art studio messenger and from there went on to become a cartoonist and eventually an art director at a leading advertising agency. In 1978 Eric made up a story about a small puppy to read to his son at bedtime and Spot was born. The success of his first bestselling lift-the-flap classic Where's Spot? in 1980 convinced him to become a full-time author, and his Spot books have been enjoyed by children around the world ever since. In 2008 he was awarded an OBE for services to children's literacy.

F E Higgins

F E Higgins was born in England but raised in Ireland. She now lives and writes in a house that dates back to the fifteenth century, in a small village in rural Kent. The Black Book of Secrets, her debut novel, was published in hardback in January 2007 with the paperback following in September 2007. It met a huge amount of critical acclaim including being the first Sunday Times Children's Book of the Week in 2007. Eion Colfer also heralded it as 'Wonderful. Anyone looking for the next big thing has come to the right place. Higgins has created a uniquely grim fantasy world that more than holds its own with Dickens or Peake. Her characters are brilliantly realised and the story grabs at the reader with hooked talons'.

The Bone Magician, her second novel for Macmillan Children's Books, was published in March 2008.

Faith Erin Hicks

Faith Erin Hicks is a writer and artist living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her previous works include the Nameless City trilogy, Friends with Boys, The Last of Us: American Dreams (with Neil Druckmann), Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong (with Prudence Shen), and the Eisner Award–winning The Adventures of Superhero Girl. She can be found online!

Finn-Ole Heinrich

Finn-Ole Heinrich was born near Hamburg in 1982 and studied cinematography and fine art in Hanover. He has been working as a freelance author in Hamburg (and frequently on trains) since 2009. He was awarded the German Prize for Young People's Literature for his first Children's book Frerk, du Zwerg in 2012 and with the Hamburg Lessing Price in 2014. He is currently living in France.

Fleur Hitchcock

Born in Chobham, by an airfield, and raised in Winchester on the banks of the River Itchen, Fleur Hitchcock grew up as the youngest child of three. When she was eight, she wrote a story about an alien and a jelly. It was called THE ALIEN AND THE JELLY and filled four exercise books. She grew up a little, went away to school near Farnham, studied English in Wales, and, for the next twenty years, sold Applied Art in the city of Bath. When her younger child was seven, she embarked on the Writing for Young People MA at Bath Spa and graduated with a distinction. Now living outside Bath, between parenting and writing, Fleur Hitchcock works with her husband (a toy maker), looks after other people's gardens and grows vegetables.

Frances Hardinge

Frances Hardinge spent a large part of her childhood in a huge old house that inspired her to write strange stories from an early age. She read English at Oxford University, then got a job at a software company. However, a few years later a persistent friend finally managed to bully Frances into sending a few chapters of Fly by Night, her first children's novel, to a publisher. Macmillan made her an immediate offer. The book went on to publish to huge critical acclaim and win the Branford Boase First Novel Award. She has been nominated for, and won several other awards, being shortlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for Cuckoo Song. She recently won the coveted Costa Book of the Year Award for The Lie Tree.

Freya Hartas

Freya Hartas is currently a student studying illustration at Falmouth University.

Dirk Lloyd has been her first commission and one that she is very grateful for. She has thoroughly enjoyed interpreting Dirk's absurd escapades with elaborate landscapes of the Darklands, classrooms of goblin school children and evil Headmasters. She hopes to pursue a career in children's book illustration in the future (if Dirk will let her out of his dungeon that is).

Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi)

Tintin was created in 1929 by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, then aged just 21, for a weekly children's newspaper supplement. Tintin is a young reporter, aided in his adventures by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in French). In Tintin, Hergé created a hero who embodied human qualities and virtues, without any faults.

The Adventures of Tintin is one of the most popular comics series of the twentieth century, with translations published in over 80 languages, and more than 230 million copies of the books sold worldwide.

James Gulliver Hancock

James Gulliver Hancock grew up in Sydney, Australia and studied Visual Communications at the University of Technology. In high school he discovered technical drawing. He has always been obsessed with machines and the way things work. This is now married with a love of colour, paint and controlled mess.

Currently he works out of two studios: one in The Pencil Factory in Brooklyn, New York, and from his homeland studio by the beach in Sydney, Australia.

Jenny Han

Jenny Han is a Korean-American author of young adult fiction and children's fiction. She is best known for writing The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy and the To All the Boys I've Loved Before series, the latter of which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2018.

Jo Hodgkinson

Jo Hodgkinson studied Illustration at the University of Wolverhampton. She won first prize in the Emerging Talent category of Cheltenham Illustration Awards celebrating narrative illustration. She loves to travel and is currently living in Istanbul and teaching Art at Istanbul International Community School, but visits the UK regularly.

Joanne Harris

Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris, MBE is an English author, known for her award-winning novel Chocolat. It was later turned into the 2000 film Chocolat. 

In August 2007 she published Runemarks, a mythpunk/fantasy novel based on Norse mythology, aimed at both children and adults. The sequel, Runelight, was published in 2011, and since then the Rune books have acquired an enthusiastic following. Continuing the Norse mythology theme, The Gospel of Loki was published in February 2014. This book tells of the rise and fall of the gods of Asgard from the point of view of Loki the trickster.

Kerry Hyndman

Kerry Hyndman is a South London-based illustrator and map maker. She has a Fine Art degree from Newcastle University and a master's degree in Illustration from Kingston University. In the studio, she works on a range of projects across editorial, advertising and publishing. Out of the studio, she enjoys snowboarding, climbing and cycling. She is also an associate lecturer in illustration at Goldsmiths University.

Lauren Humphrey

Lauren Humphrey went to art school in Falmouth before becoming a full-time illustrator. Her colourful and quirky illustrations have featured in Scoop Magazine, Anorak Magazine and the Guardian newspaper. Lauren’s favourite artist is Henri Matisse, whose use of shape and colour inspires her own work. 

Leigh Hodgkinson

Leigh Hodgkinson is the author and illustrator of Goldilocks and Just the One Bear, Troll Swap and illustrator of the Magical Mix-Ups series. She is an award-winning animator and worked as art director on the BAFTA-award winning animated series, Charlie and Lola. Leigh is also an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator, who is absolutely passionate about writing, making things up and daydreaming. Among her many brilliant picture books is Don’t Dip Your Chips in Your Drink, Kate, written by Caryl Hart, which won Highly Commended in the 2010 Sheffield Children’s Book Award, Picture Book Category. She lives and works in Sussex with her husband and two young children.

Lewis Hine

Lewis Hine is a social media phenomenon, racking up millions of views as he bravely invites the world to see life through his eyes. He is a 16-year-old disability campaigner, and in 2016 won the BBC Radio 1 'Teen Hero of the Year' award. He also gave a talk to 10,000 enraptured children at Wembley Stadium, and has a CBBC documentary about his organization, A World With Friends, which brings potentially isolated disabled and ill children together.

Liam Hackett

Liam Hackett is the founder and CEO of Ditch the Label, one of the largest anti-bullying charities in the world. They reach millions of young people globally.

Working across a multitude of countries and languages, Liam regularly speaks, debates and contributes articles on a range of issues surrounding bullying, cyberbullying, equality, discrimination, gender, self-esteem, masculinity, digital technology and young people.

Lucy Hawking

Catherine Lucy Hawking is an English journalist, novelist, educator, and philanthropist. She is the daughter of the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and writer Jane Wilde Hawking. She lives in London, and is best known as a children's novelist and science educator.

Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon was born in Northampton in 1962. His first book for children, Gilbert's Gobstopper, appeared in 1987 and was followed by many other books and picture books for children, many of which he also illustrated. These include the Agent Z series and the Baby Dinosaurs series. From 1996 he also worked on television projects, and created and wrote several episodes for Microsoap, winning two BAFTAs and a Royal Television Society Award for this work.

In 2003 his novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was published and has been hugely successful. It is the first book to have been published simultaneously in two imprints - one for children and one for adults. It has won a string of prestigious awards, including the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year. His second novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in 2006 and shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Novel Award.

Mark Hearld

Mark Hearld is a distinguished artist and printmaker who studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art and Natural History Illustration at the Royal College. Inspired by the natural world, especially animals, he makes prints, paintings and collages, as well as textiles and ceramics. 

Mary Hoffman

Mary Hoffman has written over 100 books for children. Amazing Grace, commended for the Kate Greenaway medal, and its sequels has sold over 1.5 million copies. As well as the successful Stravaganza sequence of teenage novels, translated into over thirty languages, The Great Big Books series of information books for younger readers, illustrated by Ros Asquith has done very well. The first, The Great Big Book of Families, won the inaugural SLA Information Book Award in the under 7s category.

Mary loves to write historical fiction and her books for Bloomsbury - The Falconer's Knot, Troubadour and David - have been followed by Shakespeare's Ghost and The Ravenmaster's Boy. She runs a widely-read blog called The History Girls. Mary is an Honorary Fellow of the Library Association (CILIP) and lives in Oxfordshire.

Mary Hooper

Mary Hooper has been writing professionally for over 20 years. She started by writing short stories and serials for teenage and women's magazines when her children were small. Having done a few hundred, and thinking it would be good to see something more permanent on the shelves, she wrote and had published 15 teenage novels. Following this, she wrote another 15 novels or so for younger readers, all humorous.

She is perhaps best known for her historical fiction, which captures the atmosphere of the past perfectly and mixes it with romance and adventure. At The Sign of the Sugared Plum was her first historical novel for Bloomsbury. She has since written seven more including Fallen Grace. Mary left school at 15 with no qualifications. She worked as a secretary for some years, then got married and had two children. She took an English degree at Reading University as a mature student and graduated in 1990. She now divides her time between writing more serious books for teenagers and funny stuff for ages seven to twelve.

Matt Haig

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.

Paul Howard

I was born at home on April Fools Day. I always drew as a child. I would spend hours drawing my favourite pop stars and footballers. I remember especially liking drawing kings and queens for a history topic when I was about nine. I also liked to read - my favourite books included Joan Aitkins' stories about Arabel and her Raven, Mortimer, and the Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. I worked after leaving school and then went into Art College. I ended up doing a degree course in graphic design in Leicester. I picked up work illustrating books for Longman Educational, which led onto working with other publishers.

Petr Horacek

I grew up in Prague in the Czech Republic. Just outside our flat there was a wood where I spent lots of time playing with friends. We would climb on piles of soil or build bunkers from forgotten builder's materials. I always wanted to be an illustrator, but I preferred to look at the pictures inside the books rather than to read them. I would listen to the story or watch a film and then fill up my sketchbook with pictures and images from the story. I started to read books quite late, but I haven't stopped since.

Polly Ho-Yen

Polly Ho-Yen is a writer based in Bristol. Her debut novel, Boy in the Tower, was shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award, Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Federation of Children's Book Groups Book Award. All three of her middle-grade novels have been nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

Following her experiences working as a primary school teacher in south London, Polly puts these places and communities centre-stage in her narratives. She aims to create stories firmly rooted in a world that young people will know and recognise, even when a science fiction or fantastical element creeps in. Polly is an Arvon tutor and regularly runs writing workshops in primary and secondary schools across the country as well as working for Bristol libraries, where she set up the Bristol Teen Book Award, a book award for Bristol secondary schools which celebrates inclusivity.

Phil Hickes

Born in the UK, Phil now lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon, where he works as an advertising copywriter. He has a passion for horror, ghosts, and all things that go bump in the night. His short stories have been published in adult horror anthologies, but Phil turned his hand to writing middle grade as he wanted to create the same visceral thrill he remembers from reading Alan Garner, Clive King and Roald Dahl. The Haunting of Aveline Jones is his first middle grade novel.

Robert Frank Hunter

Robert Frank Hunter is a London based illustrator. Working on range of projects in both print and moving image, he is keen to keep applying his work to new disciplines. Robert currently works from Lighthouse Studios in east London and is signed to Blink art.

Roger Hurn

Roger Hurn used to be an actor in ‘The Exploding Trouser Company’. He has also appeared on ‘The Weakest Link’ on TV – and he won! Now he spends his time writing and telling stories. A specialist in education, he has taught at all levels, been a consultant adviser to the Home Office and a teacher trainer. His scariest and spookiest experience came when he went to an old ghost town in the Wild West of the USA. This gave him the idea for Spook Squad.

He hopes you enjoy reading the Spook Squad’s adventures as much as he enjoyed writing them.

Rose Hall

Rose grew up in Northumberland, studied Physiology at Oxford and looked after orphaned orangutans for a bit. She worked in the charity sector for ten years, writing about issues from renewable energy, to the safety of workers in Bangladesh. For Usborne, she’s written books about engineering, business, computers and the environment.

Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall lives and works in Cumbria. Her first novel, Haweswater, won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book; her second, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004. Her work has been translated into ten languages. In 2013 she won the BBC National Short Story Award for her story 'Mrs Fox'.

Shirley Hughes

Shirley Hughes illustrated more than 200 children's books and is one of the best-loved writers for children, with beloved classics including the Alfie and Annie Rose stories, and Dogger. She won the Kate Greenaway Medal twice and was awarded the OBE for her distinguished service to children's literature. In 2007, Dogger was voted the UK's favourite Kate Greenaway Medal-winning book of all time. She passed away in March 2022 at the age of 94.

Sonya Hartnett

Sonya Hartnett is an Australian author who writes fiction for children, young adults and adults and has won numerous prizes and awards, having been described as 'the finest Australian writer of her generation'. She wrote her first novel, Trouble All the Way, at the age of thirteen and had it published when she was fifteen. Her books have also been published in Europe and North America.

Although she is often classified as a writer of young adult fiction, Hartnett does not consider this label entirely accurate: 'I’ve been perceived as a young adult writer whereas my books have never really been young adult novels in the sort of classic sense of the idea". Hartnett won the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Sophy Henn

Sophy Henn is the acclaimed picture book maker behind Where Bear?, Pass It On, Edie, and the adorable Pom Pom series. She studied at Camberwell and Central Saint Martins, and is a graduate of the MA in Sequential Illustration at the University of Brighton.

Her debut title, Where Bear?, was shortlisted for the AOI Illustration Awards 2014 and the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2015. Her subsequent titles have gone on to great success, and Sophy was chosen as the World Book Day illustrator in 2015. 

Stephen & Lucy Hawking

Stephen Hawking was a brilliant theoretical physicist, generally considered to have been one of the world's greatest thinkers. He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and is the author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. His other books for the general reader include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universe, The Universe in a Nutshell, and Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He died on 14 March, 2018.

Lucy Hawking is a children's writer, the co-creator of non-fiction compendium Unlocking the Universe and the George fiction series, with her father Stephen Hawking. Lucy is a former journalist, having written widely for British newspapers, and she gives regular talks about science and stories to audiences all over the world.

Sue Hendra

Suzanne Francis Hendra is a British writer and illustrator of over seventy books for children, including Barry the Fish with Fingers and Supertato. Her book Wanda and the Alien has been adapted for television.

Swapna Haddow

Londoner Swapna Haddow is the award-winning children's author of the Dave Pigeon series. She loves to write about boisterous animals that cause mayhem and is working to make sure mean cats, grizzly bears and big-hearted little rabbits find their place on the bookshelves. Friendship and humour are always at the heart of what Swapna loves to write.

Her first published book, Dave Pigeon, illustrated by Sheena Dempsey, received rave reviews and went on to win three regional awards in the UK and was shortlisted for the prestigious Sainsbury's Children's Book Award. The series is based on two pigeons who find themselves battling predators in an array of madcap scenarios, all the while proving that friendship and teamwork can defeat anything. Swapna now lives in New Zealand with her husband, son and their dog, Archie.

Tim Hopgood

Tim Hopgood lives with his wife and cats in North Yorkshire. He is a graduate of Kingston University and worked for 20 years as a graphic design and freelance illustration. Tim's first book, Our Big Blue Sofa, was published in 2006 and in 2008 he was the winner of the Best Emerging Illustrator Award at the Book Trust Early Years Awards.

Troon Harrison

Born in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada, Troon was raised mainly in Cornwall, England. Returning to Canada, she spent ten years on the west coast before moving to Ontario where she completed studies in sociology, English literature and primary education.

Troon has written many books for children and teens in a range of genres, including historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy and contemporary fiction.