Bernard Ashley is one of the top writers for teenagers today. Drawing on his experience as a headteacher in a South London school he writes exciting, hard-hitting stories for the young adult reader plus picture book and younger fiction texts.

Bernard´s first novel, The Trouble with Donovan Croft, won the ´Other Award´, an alternative to the Carnegie Award. Since then he has written extensively both for television and the children´s book market. His adaptation of his own novel Dodgem won the Royal Television Society Award for the Best Children´s Entertainment Programme.

Bernard has written a number of successful novels for Orchard Books. Tiger Without Teeth was chosen as the Guardian´s Children´s Book of the Week; Little Soldier, about the gang-run estates of inner London, was shortlisted for both the Carnegie and Guardian Fiction Award; and Revenge House, a hard-hitting crime thriller, are all typical of Bernard´s highly charged, gritty approach.

Bernard Ashley lives in South East London only a street or so from where he was born. During his time as a teacher and headteacher he worked in Kent, Hertfordshire, Newham and Greenwich.

Visit Bernard Ashley at: www.bashley.com