JAMILA GAVIN was born in 1941 in the foothills of the Himalayas. Her father was Indian and her mother English. She came to live in England when she was twelve years old. Her first book, The Magic Orange Tree, was published in 1979 and has been followed by a number of prize-winning publications. Coram Boy won the Whitbread Children's Book Award in 2000 and The Wheel of Surya was the runner up for the 1993 Guardian Newspaper Children's Fiction Award.
