Aidan Chambers is an award-winning children's author and an experienced compiler. He worked for some years as a teacher before deciding to write full time. In 1969 he and his wife Nancy founded The Thimble Press, which publishes Signal, a critical journal devoted to children's literature. His book Postcard from No Man's Land won the Carnegie Medal in 1999. He lives in Gloucestershire. Tim Stevens studied illustration at Camberwell College of Art. He illustrated The Girls in the Velvet Frame (Adele Geras) and Down with the Dirty Danes (Gillian Cross) for HarperCollins. He lives in Suffolk.