Frances Hardinge

Frances Hardinge is a British author of children's and young adult fantasy celebrated for her extraordinary imagination, complex plots, and vivid secondary worlds. She won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel for Cuckoo Song (2015), as well as the Costa Children's Book Award and the Costa Book of the Year for The Lie Tree (2015). Born in Gloucestershire and raised partly in a small village and partly in Kent, Hardinge studied English Literature at Oxford. She worked in computing and publishing before becoming a full-time writer. Her novels include Fly by Night, Verdigris Deep, A Face Like Glass, Gullstruck Island, The Lie Tree, and A Skinful of Shadows. Hardinge is considered one of the most important voices in British children's fiction and is unusual in winning the Costa Book of the Year, a mainstream literary prize, for a children's book. She lives in Oxford.