About Lucy

Lucy Strange is an award-winning children’s author who lives in the heart of the Kent countryside with her partner and their young son.

Lucy’s books capture elements of classic children’s literature in a style that is engaging and accessible for today’s younger readers. Often inspired by folklore and fairy tales, Lucy combines historical settings with touches of magic and fantasy to create utterly convincing worlds in which anything might happen…

Lucy won the 2014 Montegrappa First Fiction Prize, and has gone on to publish four novels with Chicken House in the UK. Her first novel, The Secret of Nightingale Wood, was published in October 2016 and was the Waterstones Book of the Month, described as ‘startlingly good’ by The Daily Telegraph who placed it at Number 10 in the Top 50 Books of 2016. The US edition was launched in New York at the end of 2017 and was immediately chosen for Amazon’s list of the Best Children’s Books of the Year.

Her second novel, Our Castle by the Sea, was the Independent Booksellers’ Children’s Book of the Month, The Times Children’s Book of the Week, nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Waterstones Book Prize 2020. Lucy’s books are published by Scholastic in the US and have been translated into many languages including French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Croatian, Russian, Farsi and Mandarin.

The Ghost of Gosswater was published in 2020 and was the Times Book of the Week and was chosen as one of The Times best children’s books of the year: “a classic gothic novel for beginners.”

Lucy’s latest books for young readers are the folk-horror fairy tale Sisters of the Lost Marsh (2021), which was described by Hilary McKay as her “book of the year”, and The Mermaid in the Millpond (2022). This is a short, dyslexia-friendly novel about friendship and freedom, set during the Industrial Revolution and published by Barrington Stoke.

Before becoming a professional writer, Lucy worked as an English teacher for fifteen years. Having also trained and worked as an actor, Lucy narrates her own audiobooks, winning the 2019 Audie Award for The Secret of Nightingale Wood.