Amanda Mitchison

Amanda Mitchison is a children’s writer. Her background in journalism, and her interest in depicting the real world in all its vividness, have influenced everything she has written — even her hyper-realistic pet care guide to dragons. She has published four non-fiction books for children. Her first novel, Mission Telemark, was a remake (featuring children) of the famous World War Two Special Operations Executive raid on the Vemork power station in Rjukan, Norway, and incorporated foldouts on skinning rabbits and instructions on how to build a snow hole. Her children’s thriller Crog was set in Glencoe and has been described as ‘Stig of the Dump meets 39 Steps’. Her next novel, for midrange readers, is about a boy in care.

After training as a journalist on New Society magazine, Amanda Mitchison became a staff writer for the Independent magazine. Later she worked as a foreign reporter for the Sunday Correspondent, and as an interviewer and columnist on the Sunday Telegraph. Her journalism has appeared in most British broadsheets and she still writes occasionally for the Guardian. She won the Catherine Pakenham award for journalism in 1989, and an Arts Council writers’ scholarship in 2005. Her biography of David Livingstone was shortlisted for a Blue Peter award.

Amanda Mitchison was born and brought up in Scotland. She spent her twenties living in Cairo, where she worked on the Egyptian Gazette and in Italy, where she presented the news on Vatican Radio. She now lives outside Bristol with her husband and two sons.