Nicola Morgan was born in a boys’ boarding school, where she was educated until the age of eleven; she then went to a girls’ boarding school, where no one was impressed by her tree-climbing and weapon-making skills. At Cambridge University, she studied Classics and Philosophy, before becoming a teacher, later specialising in dyslexia; she taught for 16 years and then founded Magic Readers, followed by The Child Literacy Centre, www.childliteracy.com, which she still runs. She is now a full-time children’s author and many of her early learning books are long-standing UK best-sellers. But she is best known for her acclaimed and hard-hitting books for older children and teenagers, and has won awards for her teenage fiction, including The Scottish Children’s Book of the Year for Sleepwalking. She also has a long-standing fascination with the human brain, and her examination of the teenage brain, Blame My Brain was short-listed for the prestigious Aventis Junior Prize. Know Your Brain, also for young people, followed in 2007. As well as writing, Nicola travels widely, speaking to wide-ranging audiences about either books or brains, and frequently both. She is Chair of the Society of Authors in Scotland, and lives in Edinburgh with her husband and two daughters.