Authors Similar like Pádraig Kenny

Ross Montgomery

Ross Montgomery has worked as a pig farmer, a postman and a primary school teacher, so writing books was the next logical step. He spent his childhood reading everything he could get his hands on, from Jacqueline Wilson to Beano annuals, and it taught him pretty much everything that's worth knowing. If you looked through his pockets you'd find empty crisp packets, lists of things to do, and a bottle of that stuff you put on your nails to stop you biting them. He lives in London with his girlfriend, a cat called Fun Bobby, and a cactus on every available surface.

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Nicki Thornton

Nicki is a former bookseller, and still lives in Oxfordshire where she ran a bookshop for more than ten years. She remains passionate about books, bookshops and anything that celebrates reading for pleasure and writes a regular Mystery Journal celebrating all things crime fiction for young people.

Nicki Thornton’s ‘wickedly funny and wildly original haunted whodunit’ The Last Chance Hotel, was selected as Waterstones Book of the Month October 2018 and has gone on to be an international bestseller, being translated into fifteen languages. Nicki Thornton’s debut won the 2019 Ealing Junior Book Award, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal 2019, was shortlisted for the 2019 CrimeFest Best Crime Novel for Children, the 2019 Oxfordshire Book Award

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Phil Hickes

I live in Oregon at the moment, though I hail from the UK. Growing up in a house overlooking a graveyard, on the edge of the bleak and foreboding Pennine Hills, seems to have instilled in me an obsession with all things dark and spooky. The complete Aveline Jones trilogy is available at all good bookstores and has been, or will be, translated into Spanish, German, Czech, French, Turkish, Polish and Russian. My latest effort is called Shadowhall Academy and follows the spooky adventures of the Aunt Lilian character from the Aveline books as a young girl in the 1980s. I also have a dyslexia-friendly ghost story coming out with Barrington Stoke at Halloween this year.

Favourite authors include Robert Aickman, Stephen King (his early stuff), M

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Hayley Hoskins

Long-listed for the Bath Children's Novel award, Hayley Hoskins writes in the space between family and work, with much support from her writing group.
Mum to a teenage boy, she spends a disproportionate amount of time hoping that her son's life is far less complicated than those of the characters in her books, and trying to ensure he becomes a 'good egg'.
Originally from the Forest of Dean, Hayley lives with her family and hairy breeze-block of a dog in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Her debut children's novel, The Whisperling, was long-listed for the Branford Boase Award. The follow up, The Whisperling Twins, publishes in summer 2024.

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Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell was born in 1987 and grew up in Africa and Europe. In 2008 she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her first book, The Girl Savage, was born of her love of Zimbabwe and her own childhood there; her second, Rooftoppers, was inspired by summers working in Paris and by night-time trespassing on the rooftops of All Souls. She is currently working on her doctorate alongside an adult novel.

Source: Katherine Rundell

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Richard Ayoade

Richard Ellef Ayoade is a British comedian, film director, screenwriter, television presenter, actor, and author best known for his role as the socially awkward IT technician Maurice Moss in Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd, for which he won the 2014 BAFTA for Best Male Comedy Performance.

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Tom Percival

Tom Percival writes and illustrates picture books (you know, for kids) as well as illustrating books written by other people. The most well known of these is probably the excellent Skulduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy.

He grew up in a remote and beautiful part of South Shropshire. On reflection this seemed rather more remote than beautiful, owing to the fact that he lived in a small caravan without electricity, mains water or any sensible form of heating. He thinks that he’s probably one of the few people in his peer group to have learnt to read by gas lamp.
Surprisingly enough he has never been called ‘hippy’ (to the best of his knowledge)

Tom now lives in an actual house with his girlfriend and their two young sons.
His favourite colour

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Kieran Larwood

Kieran Larwood is the author of Freaks, and was the winner of the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition 2011.
Kieran is one of only two male Reception class teachers on the Isle of Wight.
His days mainly consist of singing nursery rhymes, tying shoelaces, trying to locate who has had an ‘accident’ by sense of smell alone, and vast, endless mountains of paperwork.
Kieran graduated from Southampton University with a degree in English, and also did a foundation year at Falmouth College of Art. Ever since he first read The Hobbit at age six, he has been passionate about stories and storytelling.
Kieran lives with his family on the Isle of Wight. It is his dream to write full time and leave the ‘accidents’ to someone else.

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Karen Foxlee

Karen Foxlee is an Australian author who lives and writes in Queensland. Her young adult novels The Anatomy of Wings (UQP/Knopf/Atlantic) and The Midnight Dress (Knopf/UQP/Hot Key Books) have been published internationally to much acclaim. The Anatomy of Wings won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book 2008 (South Asia/Pacific), the Dobbie Award 2008, and a Parent’s Choice Gold Award in the U.S. The Midnight Dress was selected as an ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults title in 2014. Foxlee’s first middle grade novel Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy (Knopf / Hot Key Books) was published in January 2014 and to date has received several starred reviews.

Karen Foxlee was born in Mount Isa, Queensland in 1971. She has worked most of her adult

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Karen Foxlee

Karen Foxlee is an Australian author who lives and writes in Queensland. Her young adult novels The Anatomy of Wings (UQP/Knopf/Atlantic) and The Midnight Dress (Knopf/UQP/Hot Key Books) have been published internationally to much acclaim. The Anatomy of Wings won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book 2008 (South Asia/Pacific), the Dobbie Award 2008, and a Parent’s Choice Gold Award in the U.S. The Midnight Dress was selected as an ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults title in 2014. Foxlee’s first middle grade novel Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy (Knopf / Hot Key Books) was published in January 2014 and to date has received several starred reviews.

Karen Foxlee was born in Mount Isa, Queensland in 1971. She has worked most of her adult

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Alastair Chisholm

Alastair is an award-winning children's author and puzzle creator. He's the author of the sci-fi middle-grade adventures ORION LOST and ADAM-2 , and children's picture books THE PRINCE AND THE WITCH AND THE THIEF AND THE BEARS and INCH AND GRUB, as well as books of Sudoku, Kakuro and other puzzles, including the Kids' Book of Sudoku and Kids' Book of Kakuro series.

Alastair lives in Edinburgh with his wife (who is lovely), two children (who are lovely but very loud), and a cat who is yowling at him even though there is clearly food in her bowl, look, it’s right there, *look*.

You can follow him on Twitter at @alastair_ch

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Liz Kessler

Liz Kessler is the author of three novels about Philippa Fisher as well as the NEW YORK TIMES best-selling Emily Windsnap series. She lives in Manchester, England.

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James Nicol

I always knew I wanted to write the kind of fantasy novel I had escaped into as a child, somewhere that felt safe and filled with characters that did brave things and had lots of fun at the same time. But I wanted the magic in my book to be part of the world, not a secret, and I wanted to see what happened after a witch was trained and was sent out into the world to work. When I was thinking about all this, one day I got a really clear image of a scene for the book – I wrote it all down as quickly as I could and then thought, now what happens next ...

James Nicol has loved books and stories his whole life. As a child he spent hours absorbed in novels, watching epic 1980s cartoons or adventuring in the wood at the bottom of the garden searchi

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Natasha Hastings

Natasha Hastings is the bestselling author of fantasy books for adults and children. Her debut novel, The Frost Fair (the first in her magical-historical trilogy, The Miraculous Sweetmakers), was the Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month in November 2023, longlisted for the Branford Boase Award, Editor’s Choice in The Bookseller, and a Times Book of the Week. The second in the trilogy – The Sea Queen – was published in September 2024, and became a #1 Amazon bestseller.

Her debut regency romantasy for adults, How To Charm A Viscount, will be released in May 2025 under the name Natasha J. Hastings. All of her books are published by HarperCollins.

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Nicki Thornton

Nicki is a former bookseller, and still lives in Oxfordshire where she ran a bookshop for more than ten years. She remains passionate about books, bookshops and anything that celebrates reading for pleasure and writes a regular Mystery Journal celebrating all things crime fiction for young people.

Nicki Thornton’s ‘wickedly funny and wildly original haunted whodunit’ The Last Chance Hotel, was selected as Waterstones Book of the Month October 2018 and has gone on to be an international bestseller, being translated into fifteen languages. Nicki Thornton’s debut won the 2019 Ealing Junior Book Award, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal 2019, was shortlisted for the 2019 CrimeFest Best Crime Novel for Children, the 2019 Oxfordshire Book Award

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Matt Goodfellow

Matt Goodfellow was a primary school teacher for more than ten years before becoming a full-time poet and author. Shu Lin’s Grandpa is his first book with Candlewick Press. He lives with his wife and children in Manchester, England.

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M.G. Leonard

M. G. Leonard is a writer of books, poems and screenplays. She has a first-class honours degree in English literature and an MA in Shakespeare Studies from Kings College London. She works as a freelance Digital Media Producer for clients such as the National Theatre, and Harry Potter West End, and previously worked as a Senior Digital Producer at the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House and Shakespeare’s Globe. She spent her early career in the music industry running Setanta Records, an independent record label, and managing bands, most notably The Divine Comedy. After leaving the music industry, she trained as an actor, dabbling in directing and producing as well as performing, before deciding to write her stories down. Maya lives in Br

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Erin Entrada Kelly

Author of books for young people.

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Dhonielle Clayton

Dhonielle Clayton is a New York Times bestselling author of The Marvellers series, The Belles series, Shattered Midnight, co-author of Blackout, Whiteout, The Rumor Game, and of the Tiny Pretty Things duology, a Netflix original series. She hails from the Washington, D.C. suburbs on the Maryland side. She taught secondary school for several years, and is a former elementary and middle school librarian. She is COO of the non-profit We Need Diverse Books. She is the President and founder of Cake Creative and Electric Postcard Entertainment, IP story companies creating diverse books for all ages. She’s an avid traveller, and always on the hunt for magic and mischief. Find her on Instagram: @brownbookworm.

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Helena Duggan

I am from Kilkenny, a medieval, haunted city in the south of Ireland, which was the inspiration for the town in A Place Called Perfect. I write stories full of adventure because I get bored really easily.

A Place Called Perfect was my first book. It was published in August 2017 and was a Waterstones Book of the Month. It won numerous awards including Crimefest Children's Book of the Year and was nominated for the Irish Book Awards and Waterstones Children's Prize.

The series is a bestselling series has sold over 230,000 copies in the UK and counting and is published in 13 languages to date. Perfect has also been optioned for an animated TV series by Jellyfish Productions.

The Light Thieves is my new eco/tech adventure series that has just b

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Phil Hickes

I live in Oregon at the moment, though I hail from the UK. Growing up in a house overlooking a graveyard, on the edge of the bleak and foreboding Pennine Hills, seems to have instilled in me an obsession with all things dark and spooky. The complete Aveline Jones trilogy is available at all good bookstores and has been, or will be, translated into Spanish, German, Czech, French, Turkish, Polish and Russian. My latest effort is called Shadowhall Academy and follows the spooky adventures of the Aunt Lilian character from the Aveline books as a young girl in the 1980s. I also have a dyslexia-friendly ghost story coming out with Barrington Stoke at Halloween this year.

Favourite authors include Robert Aickman, Stephen King (his early stuff), M

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Victoria Williamson

A lifelong storyteller and daydreamer, Victoria Williamson is an author and teacher who has lived and worked in Africa, China, America and the UK.

Victoria grew up in Kirkintilloch, north Glasgow, surrounded by hills on the edge of a forest estate where many of her early ghost stories and fantasy tales were born amid the magical trees and spooky old ruined buildings.

After studying Physics at the University of Glasgow, she set out on her own real life adventures, which included teaching Maths and Science in Cameroon, training teachers in Malawi, teaching English in China and working with children with special needs in the UK.

A qualified primary school teacher with a degree in Mandarin Chinese from Yunnan University and a Master’s degree in Sp

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Nadine Aisha Jassat

Nadine Aisha Jassat is the author of poetry collection Let Me Tell You This, described by Nikita Gill (The Girl and The Goddess) as 'beautifully written, immense and full of passion'. She is the author of two middle-grade mystery novels in verse: The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them) described by Sophie Anderson (The House With Chicken Legs) as ‘one of those books that truly makes the world a better place,' and The Hidden Story of Estie Noor, described by Maisie Chan (Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths) as a ‘warm hug of a book', where 'finding the power of telling your own story is central to this joyful tale of kindness and community.’

Nadine has taught and performed internationally and across media, including BBC Scotland’s The Big

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Catherine Johnson

Catherine Johnson is a British author and screenwriter known for her young adult fiction and work in film, television and radio. Born in London to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, she studied film at St Martin's School of Art before publishing her debut novel, The Last Welsh Summer (1993). She has since written around 20 novels, including works on Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, and won the 2019 Little Rebels Award for Freedom. Her historical novel Sawbones (2013) earned multiple shortlistings and the Young Quills Award. Johnson co-wrote the screenplay for Bullet Boy (2004) with Saul Dibb, and has served as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, Writer in Residence at Holloway Prison, and judge for the Jhalak Prize. In 2019, she was elected a Fel

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Claire Hatcher-Smith

Claire is a speech and language therapist, with a masters in special education.
Originally from the UK, she now lives surrounded by sea on Vancouver Island, with her husband, their son and a Korean rescue dog. Neurodivergent herself, when she isn't writing, Claire runs peer-support groups for autistic tweens and teens.

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M.A. Bennett

M. A. Bennett is half Venetian and was born in Manchester, England, and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She is a history graduate of Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialized in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source. After university she studied art and has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones. She was married on the Grand Canal in Venice and lives in north London with her husband, son, and daughter.

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Darren Simpson

Darren Simpson writes vivid, unruly fiction for older children and teens.

His debut novel, Scavengers, was a Guardian Best Book of the Year, and was selected for the national Summer Reading Challenge. The Memory Thieves was an Observer Book of the Month and a World Book Day Summer Read, while Furthermoor was Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Month and a Waterstones Best Book of the Year. Darren’s stories have won awards and been translated into several languages. He’s been nominated twice for the prestigious Carnegie Medal.

His latest novel, Thirst, is out now.

Darren lives in Nottingham, where he works with the Literacy Trust to promote reading for pleasure. He loves using unusual settings to explore bravery, self-discovery, and the strange

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P.G. Bell

P.G. Bell is a native of south Wales, where he was raised on a diet of Greek mythology, ghost stories and Doctor Who. He's had all sorts of jobs over the years, from lifeguard to roller coaster operator, but all he's ever really wanted to do is write stories for a living. And now he does! He lives in Wales with his wife Anna and their two children.

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Jim Pipe

Jim Pipe studied Ancient & Modern History at Oxford University, then spent ten years in publishing before becoming a full-time writer. He has written numerous non-fiction books for children, many on historical subjects. He lives in Dublin, Ireland, with his lovely wife Melissa and his twin sons.

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Jenny Pearson

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

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Claire Powell

I'm an illustrator and picture book maker based in London. In a previous life, I was a graphic designer who spent many years in the world of brand identity. Sometimes I go back to visit.

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Luan Goldie

Luan Goldie is a Glasgow born novelist and short story writer from East London.

Her debut, Nightingale Point, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She is also the author of Homecoming and These Streets.

Her first book for children, Skylar and the K-Pop Headteacher is a body swap adventure for middle grade readers, set within the world of K-pop fandom.

In 2018 she won the Costa Short Story Award and her short stories have appeared in Stylist, HELLO! Magazine and the Sunday Express.

A former teacher, Goldie has over a decade’s worth of experience teaching in the capital’s schools. She also tutors for Arvon, Spread the Word and First Story.

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Lucy Ann Unwin

Lucy's debut novel for children The Octopus, Dadu and Me was shortlisted for multiple awards, including The Brilliant Book Awards. Her background is in journalism. She was a music journalist at BBC 6 Music for 10 years, where she was privileged enough to interview the likes of Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Adele and absorb hundreds of hours of wonderful live music.

Brought up in Birmingham, Lucy has lived all around the UK, from Newcastle to Brixton, Worcester to Chesterfield. She also lived for a year in the Chilean city of Valparaiso, and for three years in San Francisco. She has now settled on the Sussex clifftops with her husband and two daughters (and tortoise), where she divides her time between writing, editing and reading as muc

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Alex Dunne

Alex Dunne is an Irish author living in Canada. She spends her time thinking up fantastical tales for children, teens, and adults and drinking far too much tea. Alex has a BA in English & History from the University of Limerick and an MA in Literature & Publishing from NUI Galway. She is a co-founder of Silver Apples Magazine, an online literary journal dedicated to showcasing the best of Irish and international writing. Her first children's novel is being published by The O'Brien Press in September 2022. You can follow Alex on Twitter and Instagram @alexdunnewrites.

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Jenni Spangler

Theatre school drop out, ex-999 operator and occasional forklift driver, Jenni writes children’s books with a magical twist. She loves to take real and familiar places and events and add a layer of mystery and hocus-pocus.

She was part of the first year of the ‘WriteMentor’ scheme, mentored by Lindsay Galvin, author of ‘The Secret Deep’. As well as her magical middle grade novels, Jenni writes short contemporary YA stories for reluctant and struggling readers, including Torn and Wanted for Badger Learning.

Jenni has an Open University degree in English Language and Literature, a 500 metre swimming badge and a great recipe for chocolate brownies. She lives in Staffordshire with her husband and two children. She loves old photographs, picture b

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Sarah Todd Taylor

Sarah is a children's writer from Mid Wales. Her debut book, Arthur and Me, was published by Firefly Press in October 2014. She adores puzzles, codes and mysteries and is the author of the Max the Detective Cat series and the Alice Éclair : Spy Extraordinaire series, both published by Nosy Crow.

When not writing she can be found singing opera round mid Wales.

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Aaron Arsenault

Aaron Arsenault is a citizen of Mother Earth, a climate-tech industry veteran, and a concerned dad. His passion for the environment coupled with a lack of inspirational material for young readers on the topic influenced him to become a writer of middle grade climate fiction. When he’s not writing, Aaron enjoys the outdoors, playing guitar, painting, and planning his next adventure. Aaron studied children’s writing and illustration as a postgraduate at the University of Toronto. He lives with his family and a goofy goldendoodle in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Find out more about him at his website: www.aaronarsenault.com

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Erika McGann

Erika McGann grew up in Drogheda and now lives in Dublin. She has a respectable job, very normal friends and rarely dabbles in witchcraft. She loves writing stories that are autobiographical. Sort of.

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Pádraig Kenny

Total similar authors (38)