Vivian French was best known at school for being extremely weedy, and for talking a lot. She continued her attachment to words by becoming first an actor, then a story-teller and finally a writer of children's books ... she's not sure how many she's written (she's not good at maths), but it's somewhere around two hundred. Many of them are for sevens and under, but she does write for older children too - and also non-fiction, which she says is very exciting because you find out so many things you never knew about. At the moment Vivian is writing books about Princesses, Draglins, Egyptians and Chocolate - oh, and a frog obsessed sorceress. (If she's not working on at least five books at the same time she worries she'll never be asked to write again.) She does rather too much travelling in order to swap ideas about books and writing with children and adults, and this often makes her late delivering the books she's meant to be writing. (If any publishers are reading this, she's very sorry!) She lives in Edinburgh, and has four grown up daughters ... and she's a lot less weedy. She still talks a lot, though.