Black Beauty

Michael Morpurgo is the author of over 60 books for children including The Butterfly Lion, winner of the Smarties Prize and the Writers’ Guild Award; and The Wreck of the Zanzibar, which won the Whitbread Award. Michael and his wife, Clare, established Farms for City Children and were both awarded MBEs in recognition of their services to youth through this organisation. They live on a farm in Devon.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston met at Cambridge University in 2008. They have been a couple and collaborators ever since, creating award-winning illustrated novels including the Wainwright Prize-winning Leila and the Blue Fox, and Julia and the Shark, which was Waterstones Children’s Gift of the Year. Kiran is the Sunday Times bestselling author of fourteen novels for children and adults; her debut The Girl of Ink & Stars has sold over half a million copies in the UK alone and is translated into more than thirty languages. Tom is a renowned artist, and has also illustrated books by David Almond, Liz Hyder, and Michael Morpurgo, as well as writing critically acclaimed narrative non-fiction for adults. They live in Oxford with their daughter and cats, in a house between a river and a forest.