Susan Price

Susan Price (born 8 July 1955) is an English author of children's and young adult novels. She has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for British children's books.

Price was born in Dudley, Worcestershire (now West Midlands) in what is known as the Black Country. The region had a major effect on her writing which is "grounded in its history and geology, the limestone and iron ore and coal and fireclay of a landscape that spawned the industrial revolution". From a working class family, she left school without qualifications, and stacked supermarket shelves and washed up in hotel kitchens while writing her first books.

She has written over 60 books, and also worked as a Royal Literary Fund fellow attached to De Montford University.

Writing

Many of Susan Price's works are fantasy, from science fiction to ghost stories; some are historical novels; others are about animals or everyday life. Many of her short stories are re-tellings of tales from folklore. Her first Ghost World novel, The Ghost Drum (1987), is an original fairy tale using elements from Russian history and Russian folklore. She won the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising The Ghost Drum as the year's best children's book by a British subject; reissued in 2024 it was described as a "rediscovered gem".

In The Sterkarm Handshake (1998) and its sequel A Sterkarm Kiss (2003), time travel brings together a young anthropologist from 21st century Britain and a young warrior from 16th century Scotland. They become lovers and she sides with his border clan in conflict with a 21st-century corporation. For the first book, Price won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award judged by a panel of British children's writers.

The Pagan Mars trilogy (2005–2008), also known as Odin or Mars, is set in a scientifically advanced alternative world where the pagan gods are still worshiped and slavery, called bondery, is commonplace.