Sally Nicholls is a prize-winning British children's book author. She was born in Stockton-on-Tees, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two, and she and her brother Ian were brought up by their mother.

Sally always wanted to write. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would definitively say, "I'm going to be a writer." She loved reading and spent much of her childhood trying to make real life as much like a book as possible. Sally and her friends had a secret club akin to the Secret Seven, and at nine, she cut most of her hair off to look like George in the Famous Five.

She was a tomboy, enjoying riding bikes, climbing trees, and building dens in the garden. She also loved making up stories, often wandering around her school playground at break, creating stories in her head.

Sally attended two secondary schools: a little Quaker school in North Yorkshire, where thick woolly jumpers were part of the uniform due to the cold, and a large comprehensive. Although lonely at the Quaker school, she made friends at the comprehensive.

After school, she embraced adulthood by working in a Red Cross Hospital in Japan and traveling around Australia and New Zealand, experiencing adventures like jumping off bridges and climbing Mount Doom. She studied Philosophy and Literature at Warwick and completed a master's in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa, during which she wrote Ways to Live Forever. She won a prize for the writer with the most potential, which led to her securing an agent and eventually a publisher.

Currently, Sally lives in a small house in Oxford with her husband and son.