My love for words started at a very young age. For as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed dreaming them up, arranging them, inventing and shaping them into poems, songs and - of course - stories!

Books
Writing and publishing picture books has been my creative focus for the past 20 years. Throughout that time, I’ve had a lot of fun collaborating with some great artists and a handful of the world’s leading publishers including Scholastic, Harper Collins (AUS), Candlewick Press (USA), Editions Milan (France), and Carlsen Verlag in Germany. Sometimes sweet and thoughtful, sometimes cheeky and irreverent, my books have been published across 16 countries in 13 languages, picking up a few literary and design awards along the way.

Poetry
I never really got into poetry until I started to write it. While I play around with free verse, my true passion is more traditional fixed rhyme. I love the challenge of finding an interesting meter and rhyme structure to reflect the overall feeling and emotion of a piece. Kind of like matching the right illustrator to the right book!

Music
I’ve been singing and writing songs on the guitar since I was 17, many of which I understand better today than when I wrote them! It was song-writing that lead me into writing books. I can happily spend hours upon hours playing with melody, cadence and rhythm - whether composing a tune or writing and editing a story.