Piers Torday
Writing Coach
Piers Torday is the bestselling author of eight books for children, including Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize winner The Dark Wild. He has been dubbed ‘the new master of children’s fiction’ by The Times. His books have been recognized with nominations for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the People’s Book Award, and the CILIP Carnegie Medal. After graduating from the University of Oxford, Piers produced and wrote in theater, film, and TV (Argumental, Dave; Boom Town, BBC; Almost Royal, Channel 4). He is a trustee of British children’s theater initiative The Unicorn, and has staged plays of children’s classics such as The Box of Delights and The Wind in the Willows. Piers co-founded the Paul Torday Memorial Prize for Debut Novelists over 60 and has judged for the Costa Book Awards, the British Book Awards, and sat on the International Selection Panel for the Irish Laureate for Fiction 2024–26.
Piers Torday’s books include The Last Wild (shortlisted for Waterstones Children’s Book Prize), The Dark Wild (Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize), The Wild Beyond, There May Be a Castle (People’s Book Award finalist), The Lost Magician (Teach Primary Book Award), The Frozen Sea, and Letters to a Dog. His latest book is Midnight Treasure, which was New Statesman’s Children’s Book of the Year and a Book of the Year in six national publications, with the sequel, Wolf Crown, publishing in September 2025. His work has been translated into 14 languages and optioned for stage and film.
He has contributed short stories to Winter Magic, Scoop, and Return to Wonderland, non-fiction pieces for The Writer’s Map and Swallowed by a Whale, reviewed books for the Guardian, the Literary Review, and the Spectator, and judged the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Costa Book Awards, and the British Book Awards. His plays include the world premiere stage adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (RSC), stage versions of A Christmas Carol and Wind in the Willows (Wilton’s Music Hall), and Plum: Homage to Happiness, a tribute to the life and work of P.G. Wodehouse starring Sir Stephen Fry.
Piers is also a Trustee of The Unicorn Theatre, a Patron of Shrewsbury Book Fest, and an Artistic Associate at Wilton’s Music Hall.
Born in Northumberland, he lives in London with his husband and a very naughty dog. The son of Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen), he completed his father’s final unfinished novel, The Death of an Owl, and co-founded the Paul Torday Memorial Prize for Debut Novelists over 60.
Piers’s Genres
- Children’s Fiction
- Middle-Grade Fantasy
‘If you can return to the site of your foundational childhood experiences, both real and literary, and rekindle the emotions they inspired, you can begin to remember what works for child readers on the page.’
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