Gillian (Jill) Bliss was born on April 29, 1937, in London. She graduated from St. Anne's College, Oxford, with honors in English literature and taught school in London from 1959 to 1962. On August 12, 1961, she married Alan Paton Walsh, a chartered secretary, with whom she had three children.

Jill Paton Walsh began writing books at the age of twenty-six after she left teaching and had her first child. Since she began publishing, she has developed an interest in the criticism of children's literature as well as the craft of writing. To date, she has published seventeen novels for young people, a novel for adults, and a work of nonfiction, and she has edited a structural reader of Beowulf, she frequently writes book reviews and literary criticism, and participates in workshops and symposiums on children's literature in Great Britain and the United States.

Although Paton Walsh is known primarily...