Shannon Park was born in New Zealand and moved to London in 1999, where she is now Editorial Director, Fiction for Puffin Books. She previously worked on the Primary Literacy list at Collins Education and at Random House Children’s Books as a Commissioning Editor. In 2008 she was co-chair of the Children’s Book Circle, a London-based discussion forum for people involved in the children’s publishing industry. She has worked with a diverse range of authors, including Sufiya Ahmed, Jeremy Strong, Anna Perera, Lucy and Stephen Hawking, Alex Scarrow and Anthony McGowan. Shannon is on the Penguin Diversity Board where she has coordinated relationships with Mosaic and co-created the Commonword Children’s Diversity Writing Prize. She passionately believes that children from all backgrounds should be able to find characters they identify with in the books they read.
