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For thirty years Sharon Draper was an English teacher in the Cincinnati, Ohio, public school

Sharon Draper credits her parents for introducing her to the world of books.

born in 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio

Draper enrolled at Pepperdine University, located in Malibu, California. In 1971, when she was just twenty years old, Draper graduated with a degree in English. Pepperdine offered her a teaching position while she pursued a master's degree, but Draper chose to return to Ohio where she enrolled at Miami University of Ohio. She earned a master's degree in 1974.

children: Wendy, Damon, Crystal, Cory.

Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati, OH,

Public speaker, poet, educator, and author.

All Draper's books have been recorded on audiocassette by Recorded Books

I read every single book in the elementary school library, all of them. I did not plan to be a writer until much, much later.

Reading is input. Writing is output.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Draper was the eldest of three children raised in a family where education was a given.

She entered Cleveland Public Schools in the 1950s

Draper attended Pepperdine University as a National Merit scholar

, majoring in English.

graduation in 1971, she returned to Ohio where she married and assumed a teaching position in the Cincinnati Public Schools.

Draper's first young-adult novel, and the first volume in her "Hazelwood High" trilogy, Tears of a Tiger

Darkness before Dawn

One of Draper's most acclaimed novels, Copper Sun

Observer

The Wimpy Kid format is simple. Each book is full of handwritten notes to make it look as though it is Greg's diary and the pages are peppered with cartoon illustrations of his day-to-day life. The plots are paper-thin but the jokes come thick and fast – and the results have been staggering. The books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold more than 50m copies worldwide – close to 9m in the UK. The first two titles have been made into movies which, while they may not have appealed to the critics, made more than $147m at the box office. Kinney himself was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2009, something he actually thought was a practical joke ("I'm not even the most influential person in my own house," he said at the time).

d book. The first was published just four years ago by a small American art-book publisher with a print-run of only 15,000. Like all the others, the new title describes the ups and downs, trials and tribulations of the everyday life of Greg Heffley, a likable, self-obsessed 12-year-old desperate to fit in at school, hugely impatient to grow up and tormented by his amoral older brother, his pesky baby brother and his well-meaning parents. This time, Greg and his family are snowed in over the holidays, leading to all kinds

of domestic mayhem

ors on the planet and today he is digesting the news that his latest book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, has leapt straight into the No 1 slot in the British children's book bestseller charts. Its predecessor, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth, published last year, was said to have sold at the rate of one book every 11 seconds. "It is still pretty hard to take in," Kinney admits with a lopsided grin. "I feel like I'm watching it happen to someone else. It's a bit like being in The Truman Show."This is the sixth Wimpy K

Brought up on a diet of Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and The Far Side, Kinney dreamed as a student of becoming a newspaper cartoonist but says modestly that his "lack of talent as an illustrator" put paid to that ambition. Instead, he took a job after college as a graphic and layout designer on a local newspaper and went on to conceive and set up Poptropica, an educational gaming site for children. As if to confirm the impression I've been getting that his global success as an author has not quite sunk in, Kinney tells me he still works for Poptropica full-time."They are very understanding when I need to go on book tours, but when I get back to my normal life it is nine-to-five every day. I only work on my books at nights and at weekends. It is really just like a hobby," he says, albeit an incredibly time-consuming one. Each book takes nine months of evenings and weekends to finish, leaving little time for anything else. Luckily, his wife, Julie, is "very supportive" and his sons, Will, nine, and Grant, six, enjoy watching him draw – "so I spend time with them that way". A self-confessed big kid, who would happily eat "junk cereal" for every meal, he has also just become cub-scout master for his boys' local troop in Plainville, Massachussets, which he is "very excited about".

When Kinney first had the idea for the Wimpy Kid he thought it would be a one-off nostalgic book for adults. "I never thought I was writing for kids at all," he explains. "It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids I might actually have spelt things out a bit more and that would probably have killed the appeal."

He thinks the fact his characters have a slightly knowing, adult perspective is one of the qualities children find appealing. "Kids can sniff out when they are being preached to and they don't like it," he says. "So while my books aren't amoral they are not infused with morals or a message either and kids like that. They also like the fact that Greg is awkward and imperfect. He's not better than them at everything; he's struggling to manage life just as they are."

The look of the books is as important as the storyline and characters, he says. "When a kid picks up one of my books it lets them understand straight away that this is not work."

While he has not read Wimpy Kid's closest British cousin, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Kinney draws a parallel between Greg and Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye: "In both cases you have a slightly unreliable narrator who is very cocksure and certain that his view of the world is the correct one – there might well be an unconscious relationship between my character and JD Salinger's.

Holden Caulfield made only one literary outing but Greg's appearances in print have become an annual event (publication day this year was dubbed Wimpy Kid Wednesday by the book trade). But while there is another movie in the pipeline, Kinney is not planning to carry on the series indefinitely. "Success has come so quickly I'm reluctant to think about bringing it to an end, but every creative endeavour has a lifespan and the best creators know when to end things. I think the optimum length for the series will be somewhere between seven and 10, a bit like Harry Potter. I don't want to overstay my welcome."

welcome."

He was an English teacher in upstate New York at the Central Square School for a year, in 1959. In 1960 he received a M.A. from Syracuse University.

In 2000, however, Cabot hit the jackpot when she penned The Princess Diaries, a young adult novel that quickly caught on with readers primarily because the wryly humorous author was able to accurately capture "teen-speak."

In 1997, at the age of thirty, a dejected Meg Cabot was ready to throw in the towel as a writer. Less than a decade later she had become one of the most well-known YA authors in America.

Cabot writes in her pajamas in two homes: one located in New York City, the other in Key West, Florida. She shares both homes with her husband, Ben, a poet and financial marketer, and their one-eyed cat, Henrietta.

player, a running back for the Kansas City Chiefs

Kinney was born in Oxford, Neb., and raised in McCook

He played college football at Nebraska under head coach Bob Devaney

Kinney was the second of three Nebraska Cornhuskers selected in the first round of the 1972 NFL Draft; QB Jerry Tagge was taken 11th by his hometown team, the Green Bay Packers, and DT Larry Jacobson was selected by the New York Giants with the 24th overall pick, immediately after Kinney.

It's a combination between real life and pure imagination,” he states. “

65 novels to his credit.

He wrote his first book when he was 12 years old.

He now lives with his wife and children on Long Island, NY

Korman wrote his first book unexpectedly when he was twelve years old

7th grade at German Mills Public School,

Hamilton required students to write a novel during the semester.

his degree was in Dramatic and Visual Writing with a minor in Motion Picture and Television

75 books which have sold more than 7 million copies

Before graduating from high school in Thornhill, Ont., Korman wrote and published five books.[3]

Gordon eventually made one of his homes in New York City, where he studied film and film writing