Prizes, prizes, and prizes: Malorie Blackman has a golden touch when it comes to winning prizes for her books. Since she became a full-time writer in 1990, she's won the Young Telegraph Award twice, the W.H. Smith Mind Boggling Book Award and been commended for the Carnegie Medal.

But Malorie didn't start out as a writer, though she was always a compulsive reader. When she was a child her ambition was to be a teacher. She never became a teacher. Instead, her first jobs involved working with computers, which is why in some of her stories such as Dangerous Reality, Hacker and A.N.T.I.D.O.T.E children use different kinds of technology, especially computers, to help solve problems.

Malorie lives in London with her husband Neil and daughter Elizabeth. She loves writing, and spends most of the day working away in a back bedroom of her house. She needs to write in complete silence and finds any noise very distracting.

When she's not writing Malorie likes going to the cinema or the theatre, as well as watching TV and, of course, reading. She has a massive collection of books ­­- over 10,000 titles - and she's still counting. Her best way of relaxing is playing computer games. She's also learning to play the guitar, the piano and the saxophone, but promises that she'll never give up writing.