Ann Thwaite is a Whitbread-prize winning biographer and children's writer. She was born in London, spent the war years in New Zealand and was educated at Queen Elizabeth's, Barnet and St Hilda's College, Oxford. Ann has travelled extensively and has lived in Tokyo, Benghazi and Nashville and is now settled in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite. Ann has written five major biographies.
The first, of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of The Secret Garden, was published in 1974. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape won the 1985 Duff Cooper Prize and was described by John Carey as "one of the finest literary biographies of our time." Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife, is widely regarded as the most interesting biography of Tennyson himself. Glimpses of the Wonderful, a life of Edmund's father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D.
J. Taylor in the Independent as one of the 'Ten Best Biographies' ever. AA Milne: His Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year 1990, and The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh, a scrapbook off-shoot of her Milne biography was published in 1992. For many years, Ann wrote and reviewed children's books, as well as running a library for local children in her home. A history of her own family called Passageways: The Story of a New Zealand Family was published in 2009.
Ann is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University (National Centre for Research into Children's Literature). She also has an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia and a D. Litt from Oxford.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce is an award-winning author and screenwriter. Millions, his debut children's novel, won the CILIP Carnegie Medal. He is also the author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again, Cosmic, Framed, The Astounding Broccoli Boy and Runaway Robot.
His books have been shortlisted for a multitude of prizes, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Children's Fiction Award (now the Costa Book Award) and the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth was shortlisted for the 2017 CILIP Carnegie Medal and selected for the inaugural WHSmith Tom Fletcher Book Club. Frank is a judge for the 500 Words competition and the BBC's One Show As You Write It competition.
Along with Danny Boyle, he devised the Opening Ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics. He has written for the hit TV series Dr Who and was the screenwriter for the hit film Goodbye Christopher Robin.
