Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning poet, playwright, and bestselling novelist. Her debut novel for children The Girl of Ink & Stars won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year. Her work has been short- and long-listed for other major prizes including the Costa Award, and the CILIP Carnegie Award. She’s a graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and lives in Oxford with her husband and cats, in a house between a river and a forest.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston met in 2009, when Kiran was a student and Tom was artist-in-residence at Cambridge University. They have been a couple and collaborators ever since, but Julia and the Shark is their first novel. Kiran is the award-winning, bestselling author of stories including The Girl of Ink & Stars, The Way Past Winter, and The Deathless Girls, and Tom is making his illustrative debut having worked as an acclaimed artist for many years. They live in Oxford with their rescue cat Luna, in a house between a river and a forest.