Meredith Hooper

Author Photo: Jennifer Tabor

Meredith Hooper is a lecturer, historian, Antarctic expert and full-time writer of non-fiction and fiction for children and adults. She grew up in Australia and after graduating in history from the University of Adelaide, she came to the UK to do a post-graduate history degree at Oxford. After marriage to a fellow student she worked as an administrator for the Graduate programme of Voluntary Service Overseas in London and wrote history books for schools. Following two years of extensive travel in the United States with her husband on his Harkness Fellowship, she returned to London and researched and wrote the best-selling EVERYDAY INVENTIONS.

Meredith is the author of many works for children including A FOR ANTARCTICA, THE PEBBLE IN MY POCKET and THE JOURNAL OF WATKIN STENCH. Her non-fiction titles range over many topics – science, technology, natural history, art, exploration, aviation and histories of the United States and Australia. In 1994 she was selected by The Australian Antarctic Division to visit Antarctica as a writer in 1994 and was selected by the US National Science Foundation to visit Antarctica as a writer in 1998-1999 and 2001-2002 on their Antarctica Artists Writers Program.

As well as being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, her work has appeared on TES Information Book and Australian Children’s Book of the Year shortlists. She has also collaborated with top illustrator Stephen Biesty on GOLD (2002) and CASTLES (2004).

(For more information on Meredith's books about Antarctica see her alternative Author page on this website.)

An exploration of ten amazing real castles, from the Tower of London to Japan's Osaka Castle. Readers can explore the towers and ramparts, dungeons and secret passageways, throne rooms and toilets and also meet kings and queens, knights and kitchenmaids, princes and prisoners, cooks and carpenters, sultans and samurai, emperors and engineers, soldiers and spies.