Cressida Cowell is the author and the illustrator of the globally bestselling How to Train Your Dragon series. Her next series, The Wizards of Once, was an international bestseller. Cressida is also the author of the Emily Brown picture books, illustrated by Neal Layton. The Which Way series is her most recent and has already been translated into 15 languages. How to Train Your Dragon has sold over 8 million books worldwide in 42 languages.
It is also an award-winning DreamWorks film series, and a TV series shown on Netflix and CBBC. The Wizards of Once has been translated into 38 languages and also signed by DreamWorks. Cressida was the Waterstones Children's Laureate (2019-2022). She is an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency and a founder patron of the Children's Media Foundation. She has won numerous prizes for her books, including the Gold Award in the Nestle Children's Book Prize, the Hay Festival Medal for Fiction, and Philosophy Now' magazine's 2015 Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity.
She grew up in London and on a small, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland and she now lives in Hammersmith with her husband, three children and a dog called Pigeon.
Mark Nicholas was born and brought up near York. He was artistic from an early age and studied modelmaking at the University of Bournemouth. He began working as a modelmaker after graduating, but always had a love of children's picture books, inspired by Mick Inkpen's Kipper and a short stint as a playground designer.
After a successful career which included working on the CBBC stop-motion animation 'Rubbadubbers', in 2012 he decided to seek a career in illustration and gained a place on the MA Children's Book Illustration Course at Cambridge School of Art. Whilst studying on the course, Mark won the Hachette Children's Group's Carmelite Prize for Illustration to illustrate Tantrum O'Furrily, by Cressida Cowell, as well as the Macmillan Lara Jones Award.
When not illustrating children's books, you'll find Mark wandering the fields of Wales with his wife and daughter, picking up inspirational textures for his illustrations.
