TONKE DRAGT was born in Jakarta in 1930 and spent most of her childhood in Indonesia. When she was twelve, she was interned in a camp run by the Japanese occupiers, where she wrote (with a friend) her very first book using begged and borrowed paper. Her family moved to the Netherlands after the war and, after studying at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Dragt became an art teacher. She published her first book in 1961, followed a year later by The Letter for the King, which won the Children’s Book of the Year award and has been translated into sixteen languages. Dragt was awarded the State Prize for Youth Literature in 1976 and was knighted in 2001.
LAURA WATKINSON studied medieval and modern languages at Oxford, and taught English around the world before returning to the UK to take a Master’s in English and Applied Linguistics and a postgraduate certificate in literary translation. She is now a full-time translator from Dutch, Italian and German. She lives in Amsterdam. In 2012, her translation of Bibi Dumon Tak’s Soldier Bear won the American Library Association’s Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the year’s most outstanding children’s book in translation.