New Zealander Ella West and her husband live on a small sheep farm near Dunedin after spending many years on the West Coast. Ella started writing plays for children for the New Zealand School Journal but soon crossed over to fiction and her first teen novel Thieves was published in 2006, the first in a trilogy. Since then she has also written several adult plays including The Middlemarch Singles Ball. She enjoys writing for children and teenagers because anything can happen in a story for children. There's always magic. Ella was awarded the Louis Johnson New Writers' Bursary in 2006, and her novel Night Vision won the 2015 LIANZA Young Adult award and the Young Adult Children's Choice award in the New Zealand Book Awards.