Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning, bestselling novelist. Her debut story for children The Girl of Ink & Stars won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, and the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year. Her work has been short- and long-listed for numerous major prizes including the Costa Award and the CILIP Carnegie Award, and her novel Julia and the Shark, illustrated by Tom de Freston, was named Waterstones Children's Gift of the Year, and Leila and the Blue Fox won the Wainwright Prize. She's a graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and lives in Oxford with her husband, daughter and cats, in a house between a river and a forest.