Helen Dunmore has published eight novels with Viking and Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart, The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; and Mourning Ruby. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer. She lives in Bristol.