AF Steadman

AF Steadman hit the headlines in 2020 when she was awarded a seven-figure sum for her children’s fantasy series Skandar – the largest advance ever paid to a debut author. ...

Born in 1992, Annabel Steadman won scholarships to The King’s School, Canterbury and studied law at Cambridge. The idea for a series about ‘bloodthirsty unicorns’ came to her in 2013 and she jotted down notes about the creatures while commuting between Oxford and London but – despite knowing at ten years old that she wanted to be an author – she set them aside to concentrate on her legal career. Just four years later, the world of Skandar proved too intriguing to ignore and Steadman embarked on a masters in creative writing, fleshing out the story that was to spark a dramatic auction at which several publishers vied for the rights to the series.

When Skandar and the Unicorn Thief was released in 2022 the reading public were as enthused as the publishers – the book soon topped bestseller lists and was awarded the Waterstone’s Children’s Book of the Year. The next four instalments in the series were quick to follow, with the final adventure, Skandar and the Spirit War, published in August 2025 and a film by Sony anticipated for the following year.

Steadman now lives in London and is focusing on TimeLess, a fantasy for adults that sees time-travelling assassin Artemis, trained by her Cambridge faculty to protect the fragile future, break all the rules when she encounters a time vandal who seems to follow her every move.