A Monster Calls Award-winning by Patrick Ness (author) and Jim Kay (illustrator)

Bestselling and award-winning novelist Patrick Ness was born in Virginia, USA, and spent his upbringing in the states of Hawaii, Washington and California. He has lived in London since 1999. He is the author of a novel and short story collection for adults, but is best known for the Chaos Walking trilogy: The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men. The trilogy has won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Costa Children’s Book of the Year Prize, and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. In 2011 Monsters of Men won the prestigious Carnegie Medal after all three books in the trilogy were shortlisted, the first time that has ever happened.

A Monster Calls is Patrick’s sixth book, created from the final idea of 2009 Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose early death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself. In 2012 it became the first book ever to win both the Carnegie Medal and Kate Greenaway Award in the same year.

Jim Kay is the illustrator of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, which became the first book to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Award in 2012. In 2015, he illustrated a stunning new full colour edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Jim studied illustration and worked in the archives of the Tate Gallery and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, two experiences that heavily influence his work. His images for A Monster Calls use everything from beetles to bread boards to help create interesting marks and textures. He lives in Kettering, Northamptonshire.