Emma Carroll

Named ‘Queen of Historical Fiction’ by BookTrust, Emma Carroll features regularly on bestseller lists and several of her titles have been nominated for the Carnegie Medal – including her most recent, The Houdini Inheritance. ...

Drawn to writing stories from a young age, Carroll turned to journalism on leaving school and graduated in English Literature before spending time backpacking in the Middle East, South America and Australia. On returning to England she completed a PGCE and taught English at a secondary school in Devon before a health scare pushed her to follow her childhood dream and embark on an MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University.

Frost Hollow Hall, in which a ghostly encounter sees young maid Tilly set about solving a murder mystery, was the result of Carroll’s period of study. Published in 2013, it was followed by a series of titles that quickly established her as a master of historical fiction for children, and one whose stories feature a diverse range of characters and eras. Popular among her early works are The Girl Who Walked on Air (2014), set during the heyday of travelling circuses and tracing the exploits of a daring tightrope walker; Letters from the Lighthouse (2017), which features two children evacuated to the Devon coast; and Secrets of a Sun King (2018), where a girl gripped by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb is drawn into the disappearance of an Egyptologist.

As Carroll’s career progressed so her talents seem to have grown – with titles such as The Ghost Garden, written in 2021 for the dyslexia-friendly publisher Barrington Stoke, and 2022’s Escape to the River Sea, conceived as a sequel to Eva Ibbotson’s classic – and while continuing to create novels she keeps her interest in education alive, offering teaching ideas on her website and holding gothic writing workshops for schools.