Annie Dalton grew up in the Suffolk countryside of the 1950s. Her father left her family when she was six years old, but she remembers him making up spellbinding stories putting her in the starring role. Annie's mother paid the bills by working as a secretary, but should really have been an artist, and both Annie's mother and grandmother had a habit of seeing ghosts. These family influences could be why so many of her stories tend to mix gritty real life situations and characters with magic. Her best-selling Angel Academy series, (formerly titled Agent Angel) about a human high school girl from the inner city who unexpectedly becomes an angel, quickly found international success. She has won both the Nottingham Oak prize for children's books and the Portsmouth Children's Book Award. She has been twice shortlisted and once commended for the Carnegie Medal, and Friday Forever, published by Barrington Stoke, won the Verghereto 100 Ragazzi Book Award. She lives in a Norfolk cottage overlooking a meadow that has a ruined castle in it. She has three children, two grand-daughters, a dog, two cats and half shares in a third, tortoiseshell cat called Tweedie.
