Nick Lake was born in Hexham in 1979 but grew up in Luxembourg. He returned to England for university and after a degree in English and a masters in Linguistics at Oxford, he went into publishing. He is now an editorial director at HarperCollins Children's Books, which makes some use of the former degree and very little of the latter. Nick lives in Oxford with his wife Hannah, an English teacher, in a house that is consequently crammed with books.