Elizabeth Laird is the author of Red Sky in the Morning, The Garbage King, Crusade and Lost Riders. She has been shortlisted five times for the Carnegie Medal. She has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, and her son lived for four years in Iran. She met her husband while travelling in India and they lived together in Iraq, Lebanon and Austria. Her other books for Frances Lincoln are A Fistful of Pearls: Stories from Iraq, Pea Boy, and The Ogress and the Snake: Stories from Ethiopia. Laird divides her time between London and Edinburgh.Shirin Adl was born in Harlow, England, in 1975. She received a first class BA honours in illustration from Loughborough University, and won the Hallmark M&S division Talented Designer Award. She currently lives in Oxford with her husband.