Helen Dunmore is an award-winning novelist and poet as well as a children's writer. She has published eight collections of poetry, and has written nine novels and two collections of short stories. She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction with her novel A Spell of Winter, and her novel The Siege was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction and was serialised on BBC Radio 4. Her latest novel, Counting the Stars, is published in February 2008.