Alexander Gordon Smith

Alexander Gordon Smith is a British author of children's and young-adult fiction, born in 1979 in Norwich, England. He studied English literature at the University of East Anglia, where he founded the poetry press Egg Box Publishing. His first book, The Inventors, was co-written with his younger brother for Faber and Faber. He is best known for Escape from Furnace, a dystopian horror series -- Lockdown, Solitary, Death Sentence, Fugitives, and Execution -- about a wrongly imprisoned teenager in a brutal underground prison, drawing partly on his own difficult teenage years. He continued with the horror duology The Fury and the science-fiction trilogy The Devil's Engine (Hellraisers, Hellfighters, Hellwalkers), maintaining a consistent focus on embattled young protagonists facing extreme, high-stakes danger.