A list of our plenary speakers and sponsored authors:

Plenary speakers

• Shirin Adl was born in England but moved back to Iran soon after. She had always loved to draw but in post revolution Iran art was considered a hobby and teachers paid no attention to it. When Shirin finished school she came to England and studied illustration at Loughborough.  Her dream was to become a children’s books illustrator and when she finally got the chance to work on her first children’s picture book Shirin was so excited that she had almost illustrated the entire book before the contract had even been signed.. Shirin lives in Oxford with husband Kamyar and four year old son, Dara.

• Patricia Aldana was born and brought up in Guatemala. She came to Canada in 1971, after attending university in the United States.  Groundwood Books was founded by her in 1978. Groundwood's mandate was and has remained the publication of the highest quality Canadian children's books for all ages. Increasingly this has meant finding and developing authors from all of Canada's peoples from the first people to the latest arrivals.  Aldana is active in Canadian and international organizations. She was President of IBBY (2006-2010), (International Board on Books for Young People an NGO comprised of reading promotion organizations from 73 countries), is now President of the IBBY Foundation (2010-) and Canada's representative to the Inter American Publishers Group.  Aldana’s international work through IBBY has focused on bringing children and books together, especially in countries which have not had a reading tradition. Aldana was named to the Order of Canada in 2010.

• Anthony Browne is an internationally acclaimed author and illustrator of children's books, with nearly 40 titles to his name. He creates strongly narrative watercolours that blend near-photographic realism with fantastical, surreal touches and ingenious visual puns. His skilful use of colour, pattern and background detail subtly conveys an exquisite empathy for his lonely and sensitive child protagonists (both human and ape).

• Aidan Chambers was winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2002 for his books for children and young people, including Carnegie Medal winner Postcards from No Man’s Land. He has always championed the translation of literature into English, especially for children. He and his wife, Nancy, founded Thimble Press and the magazine Signal to promote children’s literature. Aidan’s publication Tell Me with The Reading Environment has been hugely influential with teachers internationally. His short story collection The Kissing Game and his youth novel Dying to Know You have recently been published.

• Julia Donaldson MBE is the current UK Children’s Laureate, being appointed in 2011, and award winning author of picture books for children including The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child, both of which have been made into films.

• Jamila Gavin was born in India and came to England as a child.  Since her first book, The Magic Orange Tree published in 1979, she has drawn on the cultures of both countries in her writing, winning the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year in 2000 with Coram Boy, which was later adapted for the stage and ran successfully in London and new York.

• Elizabeth Laird was born in New Zealand of Scottish parents, and came to Britain as a child. She worked as an English teacher in Malaysia, Ethiopia and in London. She married David McDowall, then working for the British Council in India, and they later moved to Iraq and then Vienna, and now divide their time between London and Edinburgh. Laird has been a full time writer since 1979. Laird has travelled widely, on a variety of projects. The stories she collected on travels throughout Ethiopia are now available online in English and Amharic. To research her novels, Laird has spent time in Kenya, Zambia, Palestine, Pakistan and the UAE. She has also run workshops for writers in Palestine and Kazakhstan, and worked with animation artists from Russia. Some of Laird's novels are set in contemporary Britain while others reflect her knowledge of other countries. The Garbage King for example, describes the experience of street children in Addis Ababa. Her historical fiction includes The Prince Who Walked with Lions based on the true story of Prince Alamayu of Abyssinia. Her retellings of folk stories include Shanameh, the Persian Book of Kings. Laird has won many prestigious awards, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages.

• Bart Moeyaert  After three decades, Duet met valse noten (Off-key Duet), Bart Moeyaert’s  debut, published when he was nineteen, is gradually assuming the status of a classic. Since 1983 readers of all ages have discovered the prose and poetry of Bart Moeyaert, giving him a unique position in Dutch literature. His books, including Blote handen (Bare Hands), Wespennest (Hornet’s Nest), Het is de liefde die we niet begrijpen (It’s Love We Don’t Understand) and Broere (Brothers), have won many awards at home and abroad, including the Gouden Uil, the Boekenleeuw, the Woutertje Pieterseprijs, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, and the Norske Oversetterpremien, and have appeared in twenty languages to date. English translations of five of his novels including Bare Hands are published in the USA by Front Street. Bart Moeyaert teaches Creative Writing at the Royal Art School in Antwerp, and has written screenplays and plays, and he made translations from German (Jürg Schubiger, Christine Nöstlinger), English (Carolyn Coman) and French (Chris Donner). His latest book De Melkweg (The Milky Way) was published in May 2011. Currently he is working on the third part of a trilogy about life, all illustrated by Wolf Erlbruch. This year, Bart Moeyaert was nominated for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award for the fourth time and received his ninth consecutive nomination for the international Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

• Michael Morpurgo OBE is one of Britain’s most well loved writers. He is the author of many children’s books, including War Horse, which has been adapted into a successful play and most recently a film directed by Steven Spielberg. He and his wife Clare run Farms for City Children, a non-profit organisation which brings inner-city children to live and work on farms in the west of England, so they may experience rural life. Michael has won many awards for his books in both the UK and other countries, including the Carnegie medal four times. He was UK Children’s Laureate from 2003 – 2006 and was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II with the MBE in 1999 and the OBE in 2006.

• Beverley Naidoo was born in South Africa and now lives in the United Kingdom.  Her books for children and young adults deal with issues around racism and apartheid and have gathered many awards both in the UK and other countries, including the Carnegie Medal for The Other Side of Truth in 2000. Beverley has honorary doctorates from The University of Exeter, The Open University and the University of Southampton.  In addition to novels she has written short stories, picture books and a play, as well as retelling South African fables.

• Emer O’Sullivan, an Irishwoman, is Professor of English Literature at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. She has published widely in both German and English on comparative literature, image studies, children's literature and translation and has received international recognition for her pioneering work in comparative children's literature studies. Kinderliterarische Komparatistik (Universitätsverlag C. Winter 2000) won the biennial IRSCL Award for outstanding research in 2001, and Comparative Children's Literature(Routledge 2005) won the Children's Literature Association 2007 Book Award. Her Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature (Scarecrow Press) came out in 2010. She worked at the Institut für Jugendbuchforschung (Institute for Children's Literature Research) at Frankfurt University from 1990-2004 andserved as Vice-President of the IRSCL from 2003-2005. She is currently co-writing a book on children's literature in foreign language teaching. She also co-authored, with Dietmar Rösler, eight genuinely bilingual (English-German) children’s novels.

• Michael Rosen was born into a London Jewish family, the son of two distinguished educators, many of whose ancestors had been immigrants from Poland, Russia and Romania.  He has been writing poetry since he was 18 and is a much loved author of poetry for children, and a highly respected and outspoken speaker on education and literacy. His best known picture book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, has become a classic. He is also a scriptwriter and performer and visiting professor at three UK Universities. Michael frequently appears on radio and television and runs workshops for teachers on poetry. He was the UK Children’s Laureate for 2007-2009 and the winner of the Eleanor Farjeon Award for services to children’s literature.

• Shaun Tan was born in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature, and currently works full time as a freelance artist and author in Melbourne. Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. Books such as The Rabbits, The Red Tree, The Lost Thing and the acclaimed wordless novel The Arrival have been widely translated throughout Europe, Asia and South America, and enjoyed by readers of all ages. Shaun is the winner of the 2011 Astrid Lindgren prize, the world's richest children's literature award. The award described Shaun as 'a masterly visually storyteller'. The Lost Thing animation recently won an Oscar for the best animated short film.

Sponsored Authors

• Anthea Bell OBE is a freelance translator from German and French. Her translations include works of fiction and general non-fiction, books for young people, and classics by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, and Stefan Zweig. She has won a number of translation awards in the UK and the USA.

• Helen Dennis was born in Brighton and loves living near the sea. She's worked in a boarding school for deaf children; in a book shop and as a children's story teller in a Native American Tepee. She and her husband taught together at the largest Junior School in Europe where she still works part time as a Year Five teacher and Head of English. Writing the Secret Breakers series has been a fifteen year adventure for Helen, and codes are her passion: “The idea of being able to discover a secret that no one else might know about; the chance to make sense out of nonsense; the opportunity to look for hidden meaning and to share the thoughts of the creator of the code, thrills me. As a teacher nothing is more exciting for me than seeing a child break the code of a story. Stories empower and that is why I wanted my stories to be about everyday children who simply use their ability to ask questions and to see things from a different angle in order to be heroes."

• Candy Gourlay was a journalist writing about dictators in the Third World before she took up a full time position battling dictators of the nappy-clad variety. She inadvertently became a web designer while avoiding doing the dishes. She takes procrastination to new levels by blogging, drawing and making YouTube videos for fun. She lives in North London with her husband Richard, her children Nick, Jack and Mia, eight rugby balls and ten basketballs (none of which have any air).

• Saci Lloyd was born in Manchester, but raised in Anglesey where she spent most of her time wandering around the lanes and fields with dogs and horses like some kind of mythical bog child.Saci returned to Manchester as an undergraduate, but soon left for a life of glamour. Along came a job as a script editor for Camouflage Films, which involved several projects, including a $20m Columbia Tri-Star co-production, Amy Foster. At various points in the glitz she worked as a very bad cartoonist, toured the States in a straightedge band, ran an interactive media team at an advertising agency, co-founded a film company and finally wound up as head of media at NewVic. Saci has worked in East London at Newham Sixth Form College as Head of Media for the past 8 years. In 2009, she stood down as Head of Department to focus on writing for children, continuing to run the Media A Level and B’Tech courses. Saci very aware of the market she writes for. She understands their day to day lives and that translates over in the voice of her novels.

• Kai Meyer was born in 1969. After studying film and theatre at university, he worked as a journalist before devoting himself to novels. He has since published over fifty titles, including numerous bestsellers, and is recognised as one of the best fantasy writers in Germany. Total sales figures of his works in Germany stand at over 2 million copies. His works have been adapted as films, comics and radio plays, and have been translated into 27 languages.

• Mandy Sutcliffe Belle & Boo are the creations of the author and illustrator Mandy Sutcliffe. Mandy studied illustration at Leeds Metropolitan University, during which time she went on a university exchange trip to France. It was here that Mandy’s love for illustrating children truly blossomed as she spent many an hour in the Parisian parks drawing the beautiful French children. She has created several picture books for children, including Goodnight Me, Goodnight You and Evie’s Seaside Lullaby, both published by Orchard Books. Mandy first imagined Belle & Boo five years ago, and has focused on developing these characters ever since. Today, Belle & Boo is a successful international children’s lifestyle brand, run by Mandy and her business partner Kate Shafe. Mandy never stops drawing and now spends her time building her Belle & Boo collection. Belle & Boo and the Birthday Surprise is the first in the new book series created by Mandy with Belle & Boo and the Goodnight Kiss publishing in October 2012.

• Verna Wilkins is the author of 30 picture books and biographies for young people. Her books have featured on National Curriculum and BBC children's television, and been chosen among the Children's Books of the Year. She was born in Grenada and lives in London. In an effort to redress the balance in publishing by putting black children ‘in the picture’, Verna piloted her books in schools where there was a ‘captive audience’. She worked with teachers in an effort to help them choose and use books outside the simple ‘multicultural’ or ‘other cultures’ approach and use a range of books to explore citizenship and diversity, enhance children’s self-confidence and promote a love of reading.

• Louise Yates began drawing pictures to go with the stories she wrote for school and, at a young age, began telling people that she wanted to be a children's book illustrator. She studied English at Oxford University, and currently attends The Prince's Drawing School. She lives in London.