Frances Hardinge


Frances Hardinge is a British children's writer. Her debut novel, Fly By Night, won the 2006 Branford Boase Award and was listed as one of the School Library Journal Best Books, while her 2015 novel The Lie Tree won the 2015 Costa Book Award, the first children's book to do so since Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass in 2001. She has also been shortlisted for and received a number of other awards for both her novels as well as some of her short stories.

Biography

Hardinge was born in Brighton, England, and dreamed of writing at the age of four. She studied English at Somerville College, University of Oxford and was the founder member of a writers' workshop there.
Her writing career started after she won a short story magazine competition. Shortly after winning she wrote Fly By Night in her spare time and showed it to Macmillan Publishers after pressure from a friend. Twilight Robbery is a sequel to Fly by Night, featuring again the young heroine Mosca Mye, her pet goose Saracen, and Eponymous Clent, a conman.
Hardinge is often seen wearing a black hat and enjoys dressing in old-fashioned clothing.

Awards and honours

Novels

All of Hardinge's novels have so far been published in the UK by Macmillan Children's Books.
Hardinge has written several short stories published in magazines and anthologies.