Jo Cotterill has worked as an actress and was a teacher at Wychwood School, Oxford, but now writes full-time in her writing shed in her back garden in a village just outside Oxford.

Her latest novel for teenagers, Looking At the Stars (Bodley Head, £12.99) features young refugee Amina, who is forced from her home town, along with thousands of others, as civil war breaks out in her homeland. To keep her mother and sisters occupied, she tells stories along the way to the refugee camp.