From an early age, Lisa Sheehan knew art and drawing would be her career in one form or another. After studying BA illustration at Kingston Uni many moons ago, Lisa fell into the world of graphic design, becoming an Art Director for the Financial Times. After having her two young daughters she rekindled her love of illustration and enrolled on the MA in Children’s Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art.

Since graduating she has illustrated a picture book by Margaret Wise Brown, which was shortlisted for the AOI awards, and her first picture book for Nosy Crow is Lionel and the Lion’s Share.

Lisa currently works part-time at the FT as Senior 2D / 3D Visualiser / Designer (and all round image-maker). She gets her best ideas whilst out running and lives in Bedfordshire with her husband, two daughters and a huge daft ginger Main Coon cat called Chester.

Ella Risbridger is a writer from London. Her first cook book, Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For), was named a Book Of The Year 2019 by half a dozen different publications, including The Times, The Daily Mail, and The Observer. The Secret Detectives is her debut children’s book.

Patrice Lawrence is an award-winning writer. Her debut YA novel, Orangeboy, won the Bookseller YA Prize and the Waterstones Prize for Older Children’s Fiction and was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award. Her subsequent novels have been much acclaimed and frequent visitors to prize lists.

Patrice was born in Brighton, raised in an Italian-Trinidadian family in mid-Sussex, and now lives on the South Coast.

Patrice was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2021.

Katherine Woodfine has been reading and writing for as long as she can remember. She still has the first ‘book’ she ever wrote, aged 6 – an action-packed mystery entitled ‘The Robbers Who Stole the Crown Jewels’. Fittingly, her first published book, the Sunday Times bestseller The Clockwork Sparrow (2015) was also a mystery featuring a daring jewel theft.

Following on from her debut, Katherine has written seven more historical mysteries in the Sinclair’s Mysteries and Taylor & Rose Secret Agents series, following a pair of intrepid Edwardian young lady detectives. She is also the author of a number of books for younger readers, including Sophie Takes to the Sky illustrated by Briony May Smith, Elisabeth and the Box of Colours illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, and A Dancer’s Dream illustrated by Lizzy Stewart.

She has contributed to a number of short story anthologies including Winter Magic and Make More Noise. In 2017 she was chosen as one of Hay Festival’s Aarhus 39 – a selection of the best children’s and young adult writers from all over Europe aged 40 and under.

Katherine lives in Lancashire, close to an old castle, with her family and two black cats.

Jane Blatt, mother of two grown-up children and spouse to an American scientist, lives and works in Glasgow. She is an experienced teacher of young children and an accomplished violinist. Working with the Nosy Crow Team ‘has been great fun’ and she hopes that this foray into the commercial world will not be her last! Jane believes that keeping real books alive through the play and learning of young children is vital to the continuance of the whole genre as well as being a basis for the later skills of reading and writing.