Siobhan Dowd lived in Oxford with her husband, Geoff, before tragically dying from cancer in August 2007, aged 47. She was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary person.

A Swift Pure Cry was Siobhan's first novel and it has won the Branford Boase Award and the Eilis Dillon Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and Booktrust Teenage Prize. Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, won the 2007 NASEN & TES Special Educational Needs Children's Book Award. Siobhan's third astonishing but sadly posthumous book, Bog Child, was published in 2008 and her fourth, Solace of the Road, was published in 2009.