Jessica Townsend

Jessica Townsend was writing advertising copy for a living and editing Crikey!, the children's magazine of Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, when the manuscript she had begun the year she left school reached the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair. Eight publishers chased it. Hachette won with a six-figure contract for three books, widened to six in 2019. Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow appeared in 2017 and took the Australian Book Industry Awards top prize, their Matt Richell Award for a new writer, and in Britain the Waterstones Children's Book Prize for younger fiction. Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow, published in Australia in September 2020, is her third about Morrigan: a spreading sickness robs the talking animals of the secret city of Nevermoor of their reason, while Morrigan wrestles with the Wundersmith powers she has inherited. A fourth, Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow, followed in 2025; Townsend has said she has plotted nine in all. Townsend was born in Caloundra, on the Queensland coast, in 1985.