Kevin Brooks was born and grew up in Exeter. After leaving school, he moved to London to try to become a rock star. After working in a zoo, in a petrol station, in a hotdog place, in a crematorium and in a post office, he started doing what he could do best: writing children's books. He currently lives in York and is one of the most productive English authors of the 21^st century, able to create fairy tales and noir short stories that become classics as soon as they are written. Lucas and Martyn Pig, in 2002, established him in the publishing world, while with The Chicken House he won the Branford Boase Award 2003. In the same year, he was also nominated for the Carnegie Medal. The key to understand his works is indeed his life-long passion for crime and detective stories, characterizing his works such as Kissing the Rain, Bloodline, The Road of the Dead and three of his novels transited into Italian, particularly his harrowing Bunker Diary, winner of the Carnegie Medal 2014.