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David Almond was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1951 and grew up in the small mining town of Felling. He was educated at the University of East Anglia and Newcastle Polytechnic.
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After graduating he worked as a teacher for five years before moving to a remote artists' commune in Norfolk to concentrate on his writing. He then returned to Newcastle, where he worked as a part-time Special Needs teacher and edited the literary fiction journal Panurge. He is an experienced creative writing teacher and has worked for the Arvon Foundation and for schools, colleges and universities and is in demand as a speaker at festivals and conferences around the world.
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Sleepless Nights, a collection of short stories for adults, was published in 1985
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Skellig, the story of a strange, part-human 'creature' who transforms the lives of two young children forever, was published to immediate acclaim in 1998.
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Counting Stars (2000) is a collection of children's stories, again inspired by the author's memories of his own childhood and family, and a selection of stories from this volume was published separately in March 2002
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It was awarded a Nestlé Smarties Book Prize (Silver Award) and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal (2000) and for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
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. The Fire-Eaters (2003), centres on the fortunes of Bobby Burns and his encounters with a fire-eating devil called McNulty. It was awarded the Gold medal in the Age 9-11 category at the 2003 Nestlé Smarties awards and won the 2003 Whitbread Children's Book Award.
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In 2007, it was shortlisted for the Carnegie of Carnegies. He was given an Arts Council Writers' Award to work on Kit's Wilderness (1999), a teenage novel inspired by the author's childhood memories of disused mines.
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He was the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2010.
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