Diana Kimpton

Diana Kimpton has always made up stories. When she was a child, she did it in her head - usually using characters from her favourite TV programmes. But she never saw it as a possible career especially as she had never liked English at school. Diana was already too much a writer at heart to enjoy dissecting other people's stories.

So she left school and became a maths teacher which she didn't like. Diana left teaching and became a mother which she loved. Finally, in the time left over from mothering, she became a writer which she found was enormous fun.

New writers are often advised to 'write what they know' and that's certainly how Diana started. Her first book, A Special Child in the Family, was triggered by her own experiences parenting two sons with cystic fibrosis and so was her first non-fiction children's book, The Hospital Highway Code. Her maths and science background showed in her other non-fiction writing and her life-long passion for horses helped her to write The Pony-Mad Princess series.

Diana also loves making people laugh and her sense of humour often creeps into her writing. Which is probably why she enjoyed writing for The Knowledge, Scholastic's non-fiction series which is well known for its jokey way of presenting serious information. It is also definitely why she liked writing scripts for animation - cartoon stories are usually played for laughs so she can put in as many jokes as she likes.

Diana's sense of humour also has a big influence on Amy Wild - Animal Talker - a series she thinks of as a sitcom for children. She invented the cats first and for several years that was as far as she had gotten. They were characters in search of a story. Then she thought of Amy and the island where she lives, and suddenly the cats had found a home.