An author, playwright and poet, Kiran Millwood Hargrave is best known for her award-winning children’s fiction. Waterstones booksellers have been passionate advocates of her work since they chose her bestselling debut, The Girl of Ink of Stars, as the winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2017. In 2021 she scooped the Waterstones Children’s Gift of the Year for Julia and the Shark, which was illustrated by her husband the artist Tom de Freston, and their second collaboration Leila and the Blue Fox was published the following year. She has also ventured into historical adult fiction with The Mercies and The Dance Tree.