Sylvia Waugh was born in Gateshead, England in 1935. Having worked full-time as a grammar teacher for seventeen years, Waugh began her writing career in her late fifties. Her first book, The Mennyms, was published in 1993. She won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and made the Carnegie Medal shortlist. She continued "the Mennyms" as a series of five books (1993 to 1996) that have appeared in seventeen languages.
