Katherine Roberts grew up in the southwest of England, where her first fantasy stories were told to her little brother at bedtime. She graduated in mathematics from the University of Bath, after which she worked for the General Electric Company, and later for an American company developing business models for petrol stations. When redundancy struck in 1989, she fulfilled her childhood dream of working with horses in a National Hunt racing yard, writing in her spare time.

After several years of writing short fantasy and horror stories for genre magazines, her first book Song Quest won the 2000 Branford Boase Award for best debut novel for young readers, kick-starting her career as an author. Her books have been published by HarperCollins, Chicken House and Scholastic US, and translated into 12 languages worldwide – one of them even hit the bestseller list in Taiwan. Her latest series for young readers, The Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur’s daughter, is published in the UK by Templar Books.

Away from her computer, Katherine enjoys folk music, cycling, skiing, and horse riding holidays. She has flown a glider solo and scared herself silly doing aerobatics in a small plane. All of these experiences eventually find their way into her books – though sometimes the horse becomes a unicorn, and the plane becomes a dragon!