British writer David Almond wrote for adults for a number of years before he achieved what amounted to overnight success with his first novel for young adults, Skellig. This 1998 tale of a young boy's discovery of a possibly supernatural creature in his own backyard was unanimously praised by reviewers, sold out its first printing in four days, and went on to win Britain's prestigious Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award and the Carnegie Medal.

Like the hero in Skellig, Almond grew up on the fringes of a Northern English city, a landscape that offered great imaginative possibilities for him as a youth. As Almond, who was born in 1951, once commented: "Maybe ink was always in my blood. I don't remember it, of course, but as a baby in my mother's arms I used to visit my uncle's printing works on the narrow high street of our town...