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Two of our finest children’s authors, this year’s Costa Book Award winner Frances Hardinge and Philip Reeve, talk about their books and the influences on their writing.

Reeve has won many awards including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal. Hardinge too is a multi-award-winning author. Her most recent novel, The Lie Tree, her seventh novel, was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and is only the second children’s novel to win the overall Costa Book Award. Both write books that are always surprising, always original and richly rewarding for readers of all ages.

Hardinge spent a large part of her childhood in a huge old house that inspired her to write strange stories from an early age. Reeve is a diverse and hugely talented author, best known for his multi-award winning Mortal Engines quartet and Carnegie Medal-winning Here Lies Arthur. From richly layered writing for older readers to hilarious stories for junior readers, Reeve creates brilliantly inventive worlds and characters.

Here Reeve and Hardinge talk to Philip Womack, a contributing editor at the Literary Review, and a writer for The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian. He leads workshops on Greek myth, Greek tragedy and how to write children’s fiction for the How To Academy, and his books include The Other Book, The Liberators, The Double Axe and The Darkening Path trilogy.

Age 8+