Liz Hyder
Novelist, Children's writer
About
Liz Hyder is an award-winning, acclaimed novelist for both adults and younger readers. Her first novel Bearmouth (Pushkin Press, 2019), a dystopian thriller set in a working coal-mine, won the Branford Boase award, the Waterstones Children’s Book prize (older readers category), and was The Times’s Children’s Book of the Year.
The Gifts (Bonnier, 2022), her debut novel for adult readers, was set in 1840s England and is a historical thriller with a dash of fantasy. Runner-up for the McKitterick prize, it was well reviewed in the likes of Cosmopolitan, Apple Books, and the Daily Express. This was followed by The Illusions (2023), set in Bristol in 1896, which explored the real-life overlap between a golden age of magic and early moving-image pioneers.
Her most recent book The Twelve (Pushkin Press, 2024), a fantasy rooted in Pembrokeshire at winter solstice, was a children’s book of the year in the Guardian and Financial Times and won the Nero Book Award for Children’s Fiction and the Tir na n-Og Award for Children’s Fiction in the English language.
Before she became a novelist, Liz Hyder worked as a freelance public relations consultant in the arts. She has worked on everything from EastEnders and Holby City to Hay Festival, theatre shows, radio, and more. She trained with Spread the Word in London to run creative-writing workshops and, since moving to South Shropshire in 2010, has been involved in Writing West Midlands’s young writer’s programme, Sparks.
She is currently working on more novels for both younger readers and grown-ups.