Catherine Fisher was born in Newport, Wales in 1957. She graduated from the University of Wales with a degree in English. She is a fantasy writer and poet. Her books include The Conjuror's Game, The Snow-Walker's Son, and Sapphique. She also writes the Book of the Crow series and the Relic Master series. She has won numerous awards including the WAC Young Writers' Prize for Immrama in 1989 and the Mythopoeic Society of America's Children's Fiction Award for Incarceron in 2007. She has worked in education and archaeology and as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Glamorgan.John Masters was commissioned into the Gurkha Rifles on the eve of the Second World War and rose to… command one of the Chindit columns fighting behind the lines against the Japanese in Burma. He left the Army after the war to pursue a very profitable career as a novelist.