Gillian Cross

Gillian Cross (born 1945) is a British author of children's books. She won the 1990 Carnegie Medal for Wolf and the 1992 Whitbread Children's Book Award for The Great Elephant Chase.

She also wrote The Demon Headmaster series of books that were later turned into a television series by the BBC.

Gillian Arnold was born in 1945 and she married Martin Cross in 1967. Their four children Jonathan, Elizabeth, Anthony, and Katherine, are now adults. She was educated at North London Collegiate School, Somerville College, Oxford and the University of Sussex. Her first published book was The Runaway (1979). Her first ever book was Such a Nice Girl, but it didn't get published. Gillian Cross said "... it was terrible but I learned two important things from it ...."

Three years later she inaugurated the Demon Headmaster series of seven books (1982 to 2002). She also completed The Dark Behind the Curtain, a horror story illustrated by David Parkins and published by Oxford University Press. It was highly commended for the 1982 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. A Map of Nowhere was highly commended for the 1988 Carnegie and she won the Medal two years later for Wolf (Oxford, 1990).

Cross held a number of informal jobs including assistant to a member of parliament. For eight years she also sat on the committee which advises ministers about public libraries. She is now a full-time writer who often travels and gives talks in connection with her work. In early 2014, Cross became a patron for the Leamington Spa-based charity Cord, after their work in Sudan inspired her latest novel, After Tomorrow.

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