Celia Rees

Celia Rees is an English novelist, born in 1949 in Solihull, who spent sixteen years teaching in Coventry comprehensive schools before becoming a full-time writer in 1997. She became a leading voice in young-adult historical fiction with Witch Child (2000), the story of a girl fleeing persecution in Puritan New England, followed by its sequel Sorceress; both explore witchcraft, exile, and belief with a historian's eye for period detail. Her wide-ranging catalogue also includes the pirate adventure Pirates! and the Gothic thriller The Fool's Girl. Witch Child was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and won France's Prix Sorcieres, while Sorceress was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children's Book Award; her novels have been translated into some 28 languages.