BBC7

Alan Gibbons was born in Warrington in the early 50s and brought up in the Cheshire countryside. When he was 8 his family went to live in Crewe where he found he had to stand up to bullying for the first time.

Alan has written several books for teenage audiences about challenging real-life subjects like bullying, domestic violence and the effect of terrorism on ordinary lives. But he has also been interested in fantasy and Greek myths since he was young.

In 2000 he won the Blue Peter Book Award 'The book I couldn't put down' for his best-selling book Shadow of the Minotaur. This is the first book in his Legendeer trilogy, about a boy called Phoenix who gets involved in a virtual reality computer game which becomes a bit too real.

Alan's books have been published in Japanese, German, Italian and many other languages. As a primary school teacher in inner city Liverpool and father of four children, Alan is flying the flag for boys' fiction. He is often told that boys just don't read and he doesn't believe it.