Carl Norac was born in Mons, Belgium, in 1960, the son of a writer and an actress. His early years were spent on a city housing estate, surrounded by playmates with whom he would act out Enid Blyton’s tales of adventure. His father later built a chalet and the family left the city to live in the middle of a forest. The importance of nature in his books comes from these years spent wandering among the trees. Every day after school, Carl went walking alone in the forest, making up stories. At the time, his parents owned a traveling puppet theatre and from the age of 12, Carl took part in their shows. As a teenager, Carl wrote poems and received his first literary prize at the age of eighteen. This is when he started to travel throughout the world, mainly in Asia but also in Africa and the Americas. His children’s books are sometimes inspired by these travels that took him from sandy deserts to icy arctic wastes. Carl Norac then worked in a number of different fields as a French teacher, a television scriptwriter, and a journalist before devoting himself completely to his passion—writing. In addition to poetry and plays, he has written about fifty children’s books and has received a lot of price ( He was also in the Honour List for The Andersen Prize in 2004 ) . Some of these, such as Les mots doux (I Love You So Much), have been translated more than twenty different languages with worldwide success. When he writes, the part he likes best is expressing the characters’ feelings. “A little bit of gentleness in a strange world.” These last years, he wrote some books directly in english, especially for Macmillan Chlidren’s Book ( with a american edition also by Clarion Books ). “My daddy is a giant” and “My mummy is magic”, the two first ones, are already translated in many languages. Carl Norac is the father of a little girl called Else.