Sally Nicholls grew up in Stockton-on-Tees, and after school, travelled the world, working for a period at a Red Cross hospital in Japan. Sally’s first novel, Ways to Live Forever, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and she has been shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Costa Children’s Book Award. She lives in Oxford.
Júlia Sardà was born in Barcelona. As a child, she saw her father Jordi Sardà drawing and painting, and he became her first and biggest artistic influence. Her mum Elisabet Portabella in her long black skirts selling tofu and listening to Enya was also a great influence. From 2007 to 2010 she studied illustration and other disciplines in a school named Joso, the University of Fine Arts and Massana School in Barcelona. Then she started working and she realized that what she enjoyed more was editorial illustration, so slowly she focused her efforts in this direction.
She is best known as the illustrator for such books as The Hotel Balzaar by Kate DiCamillo, Moving the Millers’ Minnie Moore Mine Mansion by Dave Eggers, The Treasures of Barracuda by Llanos Campos, Rose Campion and the Stolen Secret by Lyn Gardner, Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein by Linda Bailey, an illustrated gift edition of Mary Poppins, and Sweep by Louise Greig. The Witch in the Tower is set in the same world as her author-illustrator debut, The Queen in the Cave. She lives in Barcelona.
