Frances Hardinge author page

Frances Hardinge biography

Frances Hardinge is a children’s and young adult novelist. She read English at Oxford University and later worked for a software company before sending chapters of Fly By Night, her first children’s novel, to a publisher. Macmillan made an immediate offer for Fly By Night, and the book went on to win the Branford Boase First Novel Award.

Fly By Night is set in a reimagined eighteenth-century England and follows twelve-year-old orphan Mosca Mye and her goose, Saracen. Twilight Robbery is its sequel. Her other novels include Verdigris Deep, Gullstruck Island, A Face Like Glass, Cuckoo Song, Deeplight and Unraveller.

Cuckoo Song was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The Lie Tree, a gothic novel about Faith, her father’s mysterious death and a tree that feeds on lies, won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year. The Lie Tree has been published by Macmillan Children’s Books in a tenth-anniversary edition dated 14 August 2025.

A Skinful of Shadows is set during the English Civil War and follows Makepeace, a girl who has to defend herself from ghosts that try to possess her. The novel was shortlisted for the 2017 Waterstones Book of the Year, with the winner scheduled to be announced on 30 November 2017.