Jamila Gavin was born in India of an Indian father and English mother. She settled in England at the age of 11, studied music, worked on music and arts programmes in the BBC, and became a mother. She was thirty eight when her first book was published, and it took a further ten years before she could earn a living from writing."Coram Boy" was a culmination of the previous decade; it won the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year in 2000, was subsequently adapted for the stage and had two successful runs at the National Theatre in London, then transferred to Broadway in New York.
