Annette Curtis Klause broke new ground in young adult literature with The Silver Kiss, a book that is at once "sexy, scaring, and moving," according to Roger Sutton writing in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. A vampire love story, Klause's first novel is a darkly seductive thriller with heart and message. Born in Bristol, England, in 1953, Klause became fascinated with grisly things at an early age. "My mother read and sang to me," Klause explained. "But my daddy used to sit me on his lap and tell me the plots to gangster and monster movies. I knew all about Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Jimmy Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson before I ever saw any of their movies." Her father also let her speak to Willoughby, an imaginary little boy who lived down his throat. When she was seven, Klause and her family moved north to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She recalls that her first experience with creative writing occurred when she was incapacitated with a twisted ankle at age eight or nine. Klause wrote a poem about her mother ironing and decided from then on to save all her poems in a notebook. Soon she was writing and illustrating her own books, mostly about a cat and the kittens she has. At age ten she and a neighborhood friend began making up plays and performing them on a tape recorder. "The plays usually involved some kind of humorous mistake," Klause recalled, "like a woman calling up a plant nursery instead of a nursery school for her child." It was also about this time when Klause wrote her first (unpublished) bit of horror, The Blood Ridden Pool of Solen Goom. Each of the chapters ended with ". . . and more blood flowed into the blood ridden pool of Solen Goom." Increasingly she read fantasy and science-fiction books, in addition to Mark Twain and, as she got older, the beatnik books of Jack Kerouac. "I wanted desperately to be a beatnik," she remembered. She also read her first vampire book at age fourteen: Jane Gaskell's The Shiny Narrow Grin, which was Klause's initial inspiration for her first novel many years later. "I was smitten by the pale young man who appeared in a few suspenseful scenes," Klause related, "and became mesmerized with the whole concept of vampires." Initially, Klause responded to this fascination by writing poetry, which she described as "a pretentious, over-written, dreadful sequence of poems interspersed with prose called The Saga of the Vampire[also unpublished]." These early writings would later become invaluable for Klause when she set out on the journey of her first novel. Klause's life was distinctly changed when she was fifteen and her father moved the family to Washington, DC, for career reasons. In high school Klause continued writing poetry. After finishing college in 1976, Klause went on to graduate school in library science. She took poetry workshops in college, but poetry was soon replaced by short stories once she graduated and started working in libraries. Klause began sending her work out to magazines, collecting numerous rejection letters. Several of her poems and a short story were published in anthologies and small magazine reviews, but it took several years of concerted effort to find her voice and her audience. "I finally took a writing workshop with Larry Callen, a well-known children's writer," Klause noted. "I knew I wanted to write for young people. I'm still working through my own adolescence, so it seemed appropriate. I continued with further ones. I still go to the writing group Larry Callen introduced me to, and often chuckle about how an idea or action will affect the people in my group even as I am writing." Klause soon graduated from short stories, and with the help and encouragement of Callen, set to work on a novel. "I wanted to write for teenagers, so I thought back to what I liked to read at that age. In a way, I stole from myself with The Silver Kiss, because I looked at my old writing notebooks and found the vampire poem I had written as a t

What you should know Name: Herbie Brennan Occupation: Author Favourite book: The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber. Favourite subjects: Esoteric matters, psychical research, anomalies, Mac computers, other people and cats. Favourite journals: Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Favourite holiday spot: Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland. Number of books published: 116. Total copies sold worldwide: 10 million +. Herbie Brennan recently (written 2019) celebrated publication of his 116th book, Nectanebo. Traveller From An Antique Land.

Matthew Tobin Anderson (M. T. Anderson), (1968- ) is an author, primarily of picture books for children and novels for young adults. Anderson lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His picture books include Handel Who Knew What He Liked; Strange Mr. Satie; The Serpent Came to Gloucester; and Me, All Alone, at the End of the World. He has written such young adult books as Thirsty, Burger Wuss, Feed, The Game of Sunken Places, and Octavian Nothing. For middle grader readers, his novels include Whales on Stilts: M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales and its sequel, The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. -Wikipedia

Kelly Link is an American author best known for her short stories, which span a wide variety of genres - most notably magic realism, fantasy and horror. She is a graduate of Columbia University. Her stories have been collected in four books - Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and most recently, Get in Trouble. She has won several awards for her short stories, including the World Fantasy Award in 1999 for "The Specialist's Hat", and the Nebula Award both in 2001 and 2005 for "Louise's Ghost" and "Magic for Beginners". Link also works as an editor, and is the founder of independant publishing company, Small Beer Press, along with her husband, Gavin Grant.

Chris Wooding grew up in a small town in Leicestershire, where not much of anything happened. So he started to write novels. He was sixteen when he completed his first. He had an agent by eighteen. By nineteen he had signed his first book deal. When he left university he began to write full-time, and he has been doing it professionally all his adult life. Now thirty-nine, Chris has written over twenty books, which have been translated into twenty languages, won various awards and been published around the world. He writes for film and television, and has several projects in development. Chris has travelled extensively round the world, having backpacked all over Europe and North America, Scandinavia, South East Asia, Japan and South Africa. He also lived in Madrid for a time. When he wasn’t travelling on his own, he spent his twenties touring with bands and seeing the UK and Europe from the back of a van. He also learned not so long ago that his family tree can be traced back to John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, which has no bearing on him whatsoever but it’s kind of interesting anyway. Chris lives in London.

Marcus Sedgwick was born in Kent, England. Marcus is a British author and illustrator as well as a musician. He is the author of several books, including Witch Hill and The Book of Dead Days, both of which were nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. The most recent of these nominations rekindled a fascination with Poe that has borne fruit here in (in The Restless Dead, 2007) the form of "The Heart of Another" - inspired by Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Of his story, Sedgwick says, "This was one of those stories that I thought might be a novel originally but actually was much better suited to the tight form of the short story. I had the initial idea some years ago but was just waiting for the right ingredient to come along. Poe's story, as well as his own fascination with technique, provided that final piece of the puzzle." He used to play for two bands namely playing the drums for Garrett and as the guitarist in an ABBA tribute group. He has published novels such as Floodland (winner of the Branford Boase Award in 2001) and The Dark Horse (shortlisted for The Guardian Children's Book Award 2002).