Biography

Celia was born and brought up in Solihull, in the West Midlands.

She says, ‘It seldom occurred to me to write stories when I was a child, but there is much more to writing than putting words down on a page. Impressions, observations, enthusiasms feed into our thoughts and linger in the memory; they do not have to be written down straight away. My friends and I acted out our stories in games, our imaginations fired by books and comics, TV programmes and films. I have returned to my childhood for inspiration many times: directly in Truth or Dare and The Bailey Game less obviously in other books, although my love of things piratical would eventually surface again in Pirates!. I studied History and Politics at Warwick University, and was particularly interested in American History. I remember thinking in a seminar how strange and terrifying it must have been for the first settlers, not knowing that this thread of speculation would one day re-appear and become Witch Child and Sorceress.

I became a teacher after I left university and it was then that I began to write. Teaching provided plenty of inspiration and reasons for writing, but all writers need encouragement. When I was studying for a Master's Degree at Birmingham University, one of the tutors asked us to write something, in the way we would ask students in school. He liked what I wrote and said so. I went back to school and began to write with my students. That's when I knew what I wanted to do. I would write for teenagers, books that they would want to read, almost adult in style and content, but with people like them at the centre. A friend and fellow teacher told me a true story about a group of her students who got mixed up in a murder hunt. The subject was perfect and this became my first novel, Every Step You Take, published in 1993.

As a teenager, I loved gothic tales and the supernatural. I tapped into this enthusiasm for all things weird when I began to write for Scholastic. I’d always loved Bram Stoker's Dracula and my first book for Scholastic, Blood Sinister, fulfilled a long held ambition to write a book about vampires. Every school I taught in seemed to have its own ghost story, so my next book for Scholastic, The Vanished, begins in a haunted school. I’ve always been interested in local legends and the stories teenagers tell to scare each other (I’ve told a few myself) and it was fun to bring these into a book. The Cunning Man, was inspired by tales of a different kind, stories I had collected about the cruel and ruthless practice of wrecking that went on all round the coast of the British Isles.

My latest book for Scholastic, The Stone Testament, is a dark fantasy into which I have managed to weave many strands that interest me, from lost worlds in the deep past to present day doomsday cults.’

Celia is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her books have been translated into 26 languages and she has been short listed for the Guardian, Whitbread and W.H. Smith Children’s Book Awards, as well as numerous regional awards in the UK and America. Witch Child won the prestigious Prix Sorcière in France in 2003, and the Di Cento Prize in Italy, 2001.

Celia lives in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, with her husband, Terry. Her daughter, Catrin, now lives and works in London.