Robin Stevens was born in California and grew up in an Oxford college, across the road from the house where Alice in Wonderland lived. She has been making up stories all her life.

When she was twelve, her father handed her a copy of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and she realised that she wanted to be either Hercule Poirot or Agatha Christie when she grew up. She spent her teenage years at Cheltenham Ladies' College, reading a lot of murder mysteries and hoping that she'd get the chance to do some detecting herself (she didn't). She went to university, where she studied crime fiction, and then she worked at a children's publisher.

Robin is now a full-time author and the creator of the internationally award-winning and bestselling Murder Most Unladylike series, starring Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong, and the brand-new Ministry of Unladylike Activity. She still hopes she might get the chance to do some detecting of her own one day. She lives in England.

Siobhan Dowd lived in Oxford with her husband, Geoff, before tragically dying from cancer in August 2007, aged 47. She was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary person.

Siobhan's first novel, A Swift Pure Cry, won the Branford Boase Award and the Eilis Dillon Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and Booktrust Teenage Prize. Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, won the 2007 NASEN & TES Special Educational Needs Children's Book Award. In March 2008, the book was shortlisted for the prestigious Children's Books Ireland Bisto Awards. Siobhan's third novel, Bog Child, was the first book to be posthumously awarded the Carnegie Medal in 2008.

The award-winning novel A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness was based on an idea of Siobhan's. Her novella, The Ransom of Dond, was published in 2013, illustrated throughout by Pam Smy.