AUTHOR PROFILE

David Almond

David Almond was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1951 and grew up in the small mining town of Felling.

He was educated at the University of East Anglia and Newcastle Polytechnic. After graduating he worked as a teacher for five years before moving to a remote artists' commune in Norfolk to concentrate on his writing. He then returned to Newcastle, where he worked as a part-time Special Needs teacher and edited the literary fiction journal Panurge. He is an experienced creative writing teacher and has worked for the Arvon Foundation and for schools, colleges and universities and is in demand as a speaker at festivals and conferences around the world.

His first book, Sleepless Nights, a collection of short stories for adults, was published in 1985 and was followed in 1997 by a second volume, A Kind of Heaven. His first children's novel, Skellig, the story of a strange, part-human 'creature' who transforms the lives of two young children forever, was published to immediate acclaim in 1998. The book won both the Carnegie Medal (1998) and the Whitbread Children's Book Award (1998). In 2007, it was shortlisted for the Carnegie of Carnegies. He was given an Arts Council Writers' Award to work on Kit's Wilderness (1999), a teenage novel inspired by the author's childhood memories of disused mines. It was awarded a Nestlé Smarties Book Prize (Silver Award) and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal (2000) and for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

Counting Stars (2000) is a collection of children's stories, again inspired by the author's memories of his own childhood and family, and a selection of stories from this volume was published separately in March 2002 under the title Where Your Wings Were, as one of five World Book Day publications. A play, Wild Girl, Wild Boy, was published in March 2002, and a stage version of Skellig was published in April 2002 to coincide with the National Theatre's production of the play. The Fire-Eaters (2003), centres on the fortunes of Bobby Burns and his encounters with a fire-eating devil called McNulty. It was awarded the Gold medal in the Age 9-11 category at the 2003 Nestlé Smarties awards and won the 2003 Whitbread Children's Book Award. It also won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award (USA). Clay (2005), was shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Children's Book Award, and the 2006 Carnegie Medal.

David Almond's work is translated into more than 20 languages. He lives in Northumberland and was the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2010. His latest children's novel is My Name is Mina (2010), a prequel to Skellig, and nominated for a 2012 Carnegie Medal. In 2011 his first adult novel was published - The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean.