Jamila Gavin (Born August 9, 1941) is a British writer born in Mussoorie, India in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Her father was Indian and her mother English. She learned to describe herself as "half and half." On her website she says that from her mixed background "I inherited two rich cultures which ran side by side throughout my life, and which always made me feel I belonged to both countries".

She first visited England when she was six, and settled there when she was 11. She worked in the music department of the BBC before becoming a writer.

She wrote her first book after her first child was born because she became aware that there were few children's books reflecting their experience as multi-racial children. She has also written books reflecting her childhood in India, particularly her Surya Trilogy.

She now lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

The Surya Trilogy is an epic story following the fortunes of two generations of an Indian Sikh family and showing the impact of the British Empire and the Partition of India on their lives. The three volumes are The Wheel of Surya (1992), The Eye of the Horse (1994) and The Track of the Wind (1997). All three books were shortlisted for the Guardian Award for which The Wheel of Surya was special runner up in 1993.

Beverley Naidoo is a popular South African children's author who has written a number of award-winning novels, mainly about life in South Africa, where she spent her childhood. She graduated from the University of York with a BA in Education in 1968.

Naidoo won the Josette Frank Award twice – in 1986 for Journey to Jo'burg and in 1997 for No Turning Back: A Novel of South Africa. She was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 2000 for The Other Side of Truth. the other side of truth is a story about political corruption and how that affects the lives of the kids of an out spoken writer.

Beverley Naidoo was born in South Africa on 21 May, 1943 and grew up under apartheid. As a student, she began to question the apartheid regime and was later arrested for her actions as part of the resistance movement in South Africa. In 1965, she came to England and married another South African exile; they have two children. She graduated from University of York when she was 21.

Journey to Jo'burg, Chain of Fire and Out of Bounds are set in South Africa under apartheid, while No Turning Back concerns the experiences of a boy trying to survive on the streets of Johannesburg in the immediate post-apartheid years. The Other Side of Truth and its sequel, Web of Lies, deal with the experiences of Nigerian political asylum seekers in England. Her 2007 novel Burn My Heart has an imagined point of reference in the boyhood in Kenya of a second cousin, Neil Aggett, being set in the 1950s during the Mau Mau uprising.

Helen Edmundson (born 1964) is a British playwright particularly well known for her adaptations of various literary classics for the stage.

Edmundson's first play Flying was produced at the National Theatre Studio in 1990. Since then, her work for the theatre has included: The Clearing, first performed at the Bush Theatre; Mother Teresa is Dead, at the Royal Court Theatre; and four stage adaptations for Shared Experience Theatre - Anna Karenina and The Mill on the Floss, both of which toured nationally and internationally, War and Peace, which was produced at the National Theatre in 1996, and Gone to Earth which was seen on tour and at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Her adaptation of Jamila Gavin's award-winning children's novel Coram Boy premiered at the National in November 2005 and came back for a revival at the same venue a year later. Her most recent work for Shared Experience, Orestes - Blood and Light, toured in the UK in autumn 2006 and played at the Tricycle Theatre until December 2006. The Clearing received the John Whiting Award for best new play, as well as a Time Out Award. She also won TMA and Time Out Awards for The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karenina and most recently, a Time Out Award for Coram Boy. Edmundson has written two short films for television: One Day for BBC2 and Stella for Channel 4, and her adaptation of The Voyage Out was heard on BBC Radio 4 in 2006. She will also be partaking in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six where she has written a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible

John Burningham (born 1936) is an award-winning children's author and illustrator.

Burningham was born April 27, 1936 in Farnham, Surrey, England to Charles and Jessie (Mackintosh) Burningham. After primary school, he joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit in 1953. When he was 20, he attended the Central School of Art and graduated in 1959.

After assorted work on posters for London and British Transport and animated films, he began his writing and illustrating career in 1963 with the book Borka: The Adventures of a Goose With No Feathers, published by Jonathan Cape, which won the 1963 Librarians' Kate Greenaway Medal.

Cape were currently looking for an illustrator for a forthcoming children's adventure serial Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang written by Ian Fleming, their most successful author at that time. Fleming had suggested cartoonist 'Trog' (Wally Fawkes) of the Daily Mail, but the newspaper would not allow the illustrator of their popular Flook strip to work for an author whose James Bond stories were adapted as a comic strip for their arch-rival Daily Express. Fleming consulted his motor engineer friend Charles Amherst Villiers, who produced a sketch based on Fleming's description of the magical car- this drawing was passed to Cape's popular new illustrator John Burningham, who was asked to illustrate the whole series on the strength of his debut story Borka. Fleming's Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang was originally published in three volumes, 1964–1965, and an omnibus volume followed in 1968. Burningham's witty and timeless art-work, along with Fleming's imaginative text, led Chitty to become the most famous and best loved car in fiction

Aidan Chambers (born 27 December 1934) is an award-winning British writer of novels for children and young adults.

Born near Chester-le-Street, County Durham in 1934, Chambers was an only child, and a poor scholar; considered "slow" by his teachers, he did not learn to read fluently until the age of nine. After two years in the Royal Navy as part of his National Service, Chambers trained as a teacher and taught for three years at Westcliff High School in Southend on Sea before joining an Anglican monastery in Stroud, Gloucestershire in 1960. He later used his experience as a monk in his novel Now I Know.

His first plays, including Johnny Salter (1966), The Car and The Chicken Run (1968), were published while he was a teacher at Archway School in Stroud.

Chambers left the monastery in 1967 and a year later became a freelance writer. His works include the "Dance sequence" of six novels: Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, Now I Know, The Toll Bridge, Postcards from No Man's Land which won the 1999 Carnegie Medal and This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn. He and his wife, Nancy, founded Thimble Press and the magazine Signal to promote literature for children and young adults. They were awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Award for outstanding services to children's books in 1982. From 2003 to 2006 he was President of the School Library Association.