Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two, and she and her brother were brought up by her mother. She has always loved reading, and spent most of her childhood trying to make real life work like it did in books.

After school, she worked in Japan for six months, and travelled around Australia and New Zealand, then came back and took a degree in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick. In her third year, realising with some panic that she now had to earn a living, she enrolled in a masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa. It was here that she wrote her first novel, Ways to Live Forever, which won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize 2008. Sally was named Glen Dimplex New Writer of the Year 2008. Her second novel, Season of Secrets, was published in 2009.

Sally is now living in a little flat in Oxford, writing stories and trying to believe her luck.

Writing and Publishing Children's Literature

21 May 2011