Geraldine McCaughrean

Geraldine McCaughrean trained as a teacher and worked in magazine offices before children's books took over; the tally now runs past 170 titles, and she has taken the Carnegie Medal twice, in 1988 for A Pack of Lies and in 2018 for Where the World Ends. She also won the competition Great Ormond Street Hospital ran to choose an author for Peter Pan in Scarlet, its authorised sequel, which appeared in 2006. Casting the Gods Adrift, a short novel of ancient Egypt illustrated by Patricia D. Ludlow, puts an animal dealer's family in the way of Akhenaten's decision to shut the old temples. Tamburlaine's Elephants gives a boy on his first campaign charge of a captured elephant from Delhi. The Jesse Tree, illustrated by Bee Willey, threads retold Bible stories through a present-day story of a carver at work in a church. The Supreme Lie, from 2021, has a fifteen-year-old maid impersonating the vanished ruler of a flooded country. Lovesong belongs to none of that: an adult novel of 1996 about a twelfth-century troubadour and his daughter.