Varjak Paw

SF Said is an award-winning and bestselling children's author. He was born in Lebanon but has lived in London nearly all his life. His first book, Varjak Paw, won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Children's Literature, was adapted for the stage, has sold over a million copies, and was included in BookTrust's 100 Best Children's Books of the Last 100 Years. The sequel, The Outlaw Varjak Paw, won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. SF's third novel, Phoenix, was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and nominated for both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. His latest book, Tyger, won Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, Children's Book of the Year (Older Fiction) at the Week Junior Book Awards, Foyles Children's Book of the Year, and was picked as a book of the year by the Guardian, Times, Sunday Times and Sun. It was also a New York Times bestseller. SF Said is a Fellow of the Royal Society Of Literature. He has judged the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Book Awards (now the Costa Book Awards) and the Amnesty CILIP Honour. He has given talks at the British Library, the British Film Institute, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and on BBC Radio 4. He has also written extensively about children's and young adult fiction for both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph.

Dave McKean is an illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, and musician. His work incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, found objects, digital art, and sculpture.

After a trip to New York in 1986, during which he failed to find work as a comics artist, McKean met writer Neil Gaiman and the pair collaborated on a short graphic novel of disturbing childhood memories, Violent Cases, published in 1987. This was followed in 1988 by a Black Orchid miniseries (again with Gaiman) and Hellblazer covers for DC Comics. Beginning in 1989 he produced the covers for Gaiman's celebrated series The Sandman as well as all its collected editions and many of its spin-offs; and the Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, with writer Grant Morrison (1989). McKean has gone on to collaborate further with Neil Gaiman in both print and film.