Isobelle Carmody wrote her first book, Obernewtyn, at fourteen. The first publisher she sent it to accepted it. It was short-listed for Children's Book of the Year. Almost 30 years later, Obernewtyn is a Classic Penguin and Isobelle is a multi award-winning writer of more than thirty novels and many short stories, and aside from the Peace Prize, she has won the Children's Book Council Book of the Year twice, in two different categories, the Golden Aurealis, in the one year it was run and a White Raven at Bologna Book Fair for Greylands, now in development as a screenplay.Isobelle lived with her partner and daughter for ten years in Prague in Eastern Europe until recently, when she returned to Australia to undertake a PhD at the University of Queensland.