David Whitley was born in Chester in 1984. At the age of seventeen he was shortlisted for the Kathleen Fidler Award for a children's novel and at twenty he won the Cheshire Prize for Literature for a children's short story. TV quiz fans will have spotted David on BBC2's University Challenge, when he was a member of Oxford's Corpus Christi team who became Series Champions in 2005. In 2009 he published his debut, The Midnight Charter, which sold in 18 countries and 12 languages around the world. The Children of the Lost is his second book.