Peter Dickinson

Born in Zambia, Peter Dickinson spent his childhood in Gloucestershire and was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he read English. Before writing full-time, he worked in various capacities on Punch Magazine, where he reviewed detective novels. His own first two detective novels, Skin Deep and A Pride of Heroes, set a still unsurpassed record by winning the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in successive years (1968 and 1969), and his 21 crime and mystery novels have been published in several languages. Peter Dickinson is also one of the UK's most acclaimed children's writers. He has twice won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Award, as well as the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. He has been Chairman of the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009. He lives in Hampshire, England.