LAUREN JAMES is the Carnegie-longlisted author of many young adult novels, including Green Rising, The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker, The Quiet at the End of the World and The Loneliest Girl in the Universe. She is an RLF Royal Fellow at Aston University and the story consultant on Netflix’s Heartstopper (Seasons 2 and 3).
Her books have sold over two hundred thousand copies worldwide in seven languages. The Quiet at the End of the World was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize and the STEAM Children’s Book Award.
Lauren is the founder of the Climate Fiction Writers’ League, and a member of the Society of Authors’ Sustainability Committee. She works as a consultant on climate storytelling for museums, production companies, major brands and publishers, with a focus on optimism and hope. She lives in Coventry, where she also runs a Queer Writers group.
NICOLA DAVIES is an award-winning author and zoologist, renowned for her bestselling nature writing and fiction. Nicola worked for the BBC Natural History Unit for many years as a researcher and presenter for a number of natural history programmes, and was one of the original presenters of The Really Wild Show.
Following the start of her writing career, Nicola became a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, but she has been writing full time for over a decade. She is the author of more than fifty books for children, and her work has been published in more than ten different languages, as well as winning major awards in the UK, US, France, Italy and Germany.
Nicola lives in Wales.
ELI BROWN is the author of the middle-grade novel Oddity, a gritty alternate historical fantasy. He is also the author of two books for adults: his debut novel, The Great Days, won the Fabri Prize for Literature, while his culinary pirate novel, Cinnamon and Gunpowder, was a finalist for the California Book Award.
A Yaddo fellow and featured reader at Litquake, Eli lives with his family and thirty hens on a small farm in northern California, USA.
L. R. LAM was first Californian and is now Scottish. They are the Sunday Times bestselling and award-winning author of Dragonfall (the Dragon Scales trilogy), the Seven Devils duology (co-written with Elizabeth May), Goldilocks, the Pacifica novels False Hearts and Shattered Minds, and the Micah Grey trilogy, which begins with Pantomime.
L. R. Lam’s short fiction and essays have appeared in anthologies such as Nasty Women, Solaris Rising, Cranky Ladies of History and Scotland in Space. They are also a writing coach at The Novelry. L. R. Lam lives in Edinburgh.
M. G. LEONARD is the award-winning, bestselling writer of children’s books such as Beetle Boy, the Adventures on Trains series and the Twitchers books. Her work has been translated into forty languages and Beetle Boy is currently in development as a TV series. She has won many awards, including Best Crime Fiction Novel for Children, Sainsbury’s Children’s Book of the Year, The British Book Awards’ Children’s Fiction Book of the Year and the Branford Boase Award.
M. G. Leonard is a vice-president of insect charity Buglife and one of the founders of Authors4Oceans. She lives between the South Downs and the sea.
REBECCA LIM is an award-winning Australian writer, illustrator and editor, and the author of over twenty books, including Tiger Daughter, which was a Kirkus, Amazon and Booklist Best Book, CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award-winner; The Astrologer’s Daughter, a Kirkus Best Book and CBCA Notable Book; and the bestselling Mercy. Her work has been shortlisted for numerous prizes and published in eight languages.
Rebecca is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative and co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, a groundbreaking anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.
OISÍN McGANN is a bestselling and award-winning writer and illustrator. He has produced dozens of books and short stories for all ages of reader, including twelve novels, in genres ranging from comedy horror to conspiracy thriller, from science fiction and fantasy to historical fiction.
In 2014 and 2015, he was the Irish writer-in-residence for Weather Stations, an EU-funded project where writers from five different countries were tasked with finding ways to use storytelling to raise awareness of climate change. He has carried on this work through school residencies in primary and secondary schools, and in 2021 he published A Short Hopeful Guide to Climate Change in collaboration with Friends of the Earth.
Oisín lives somewhere in the Irish countryside, where he won’t be heard shouting at his computer.
TỌLÁ OKOGWU was born in Nigeria but raised in London, and is an award-winning author and journalist. Her picture book Daddy Do My Hair is a firm family favourite and celebrates the bond between a father and child, while also showcasing the beauty of Afro textured hair. The first book in her middle-grade series, Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun, won the Children’s Africana Award for Older Readers and was also shortlisted for The British Book Awards and the inaugural The Week Junior Book Awards.
Tọlá also writes a young fiction series with Jasmine Richards under the name Lola Morayo. She lives in Kent.
NEAL SHUSTERMAN is an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books for children, teens and adults. These include the acclaimed Arc of a Scythe series (Scythe, Thunderhead and The Toll), Dry and Roxy, as well as the Unwind dystology and Challenger Deep, which won a National Book Award. Neal also writes screenplays for film and television. He lives in Florida, USA.
BRENDAN SHUSTERMAN is an illustrator, poet and author. He has previously collaborated with his father, Neal Shusterman, on a short story for the anthology Violent Ends, and his artwork also appears in Neal’s award-winning novel Challenger Deep.
LOUIE STOWELL writes stories about magic, gods and monsters (mostly). She has written carefully researched books about space, ancient Egypt, politics and science, but eventually lapsed into just making stuff up. Having written fiction for 8–10 year olds, her Loki series was her first as both author and illustrator, and was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, as well as winning the 2023 FCBG Children’s Book Award.
Louie loves comics, science fiction, fantasy and anything funny, as well as woods, urban foxes and mythology. She lives in London.
BIJAL VACHHARAJANI is usually found writing, reading or editing a children’s book. She is the author of multiple planet-friendly books, including the AutHer Award-winning novels A Cloud Called Bhura and Savi and the Memory Keeper. She has rescued animals, edited a magazine called Time Out Bengaluru and is part of the founding team of the Nalanda Abhiyan Library movement. She lives in Bengaluru in India with a ginormous mural and a zombie aloe vera plant. She’s a certified climate worrier.