Francesca Simon

Francesca Simon is an American-born British author, born in 1955 in St. Louis, Missouri, who studied medieval literature at Yale and Oxford before working as a journalist for British newspapers. She is best known for the Horrid Henry series, a comic chapter-book franchise following a gleefully badly behaved schoolboy, which has sold more than 21 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages, becoming a defining series of British children's publishing since its 1994 debut. Beyond Horrid Henry, Simon has written for older readers, including The Monstrous Child, a darkly funny retelling of Norse mythology from the perspective of the goddess of death, and the fairy-tale collection Cafe at the Edge of the Moon. In 2008 she became the first American to win the British Book Award for Children's Book of the Year, and she received an MBE in 2023.