Jenny Valentine

Jenny Valentine (born 1970) is a British children's novelist. For her first novel and best-known work, Finding Violet Park (HarperCollins, 2007), she won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers. Valentine lives in Glasbury-on-Wye, Wales with her husband singer/songwriter Alex Valentine, with whom she runs a health food shop in nearby Hay-on-Wye. 2Writer HarperCollins has published Valentine's novels both in Britain and, usually one year later, in America. Finding Violet Park (2007) was re-titled Me, The Missing and The Dead in the US (2008). Beside winning the Guardian Prize it made the shortlist (seven finalists that year) for the annual Carnegie Medal, which the British librarians confer upon the year's best children's book published in the UK Valentine became one of the most talked about authors in the country. Basque, Catalan, and Italian-language translations were published in 2008, followed by Dutch, French, German, Slovenian, Spanish, and Norwegian. Her second novel, Broken Soup, was published in January 2008. It is her most critically acclaimed book to date and was shortlisted for the 2008 Waterstone's Children's Book Prize and the 2008 Costa Book Children's Book Award, and longlisted for the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize. By 2010 it had been published in Dutch and German-language translation