Lyn Gardner


Lyn Gardner is a British theatre critic, children's writer and journalist, who contributes reviews and articles to The Stage and has written for The Guardian.

Theatre critic and educator

A graduate in Drama and English at Kent University, Gardner was a founding member of the City Limits magazine, a cooperative for which she edited the theatre section. Later, she was a contributor to The Independent.
The Guardian formerly contracted Gardner to write 150 blog posts annually, but this arrangement ceased at the end of March 2017, although she continues to write articles for the newspaper. At the beginning of June 2017, it emerged that Gardner had been appointed as an Associate Editor of The Stage newspaper, where she continues to write her theatre blog. Around the same time, it became known that Gardner is to teach an MA in Dramatic Writing at Drama Centre London at Central Saint Martins.

Children's writer

Gardner is a writer of children's novels, the earliest being Into the Woods and Out of the Woods, both illustrated by Mini Grey and published by David Fickling Books. ISFDB catalogues it as the "Storm Eden" series.
She has written six further children's novels for Nosy Crow, known as the "Stage School Series", base around a young girl named Olivia attending Stage School. They have been well received, and a final seventh book was published in July 2013. The first in the series was Olivia's First Term.