Lisa Shanahan grew up in a small suburb of Sydney, near a river, with her younger brother and sister and a small tribe of lost and found cats. She had an ideal childhood for a writerroaming the streets, the bush and the mudflats, with plenty of opportunities to read and daydream. She discovered early the magic of stories. At ten, she spent many absorbing months pretending she was the last human left on earth. She lingered each morning at the breakfast table, waiting expectantly for a large alien to come popping out of her mother's body like a giant seed from a pod. At eleven, she learnt the hard way that stories are powerful, when she convinced both her brother and sister that Dracula and Frankenstein lived behind the green door at the bottom of their rumpus room stairs. Although they believed her for about thirty seconds, she spent the next ten years being unable to sleep at night, without the hall light blazing.
She didn't discover until much later that she actually wanted to write for young people. That happened quite by accident, in her third year at acting school, when she wrote a play for a group of young drama students. It wasn't a very good playshe's not even sure she gave it a proper ending, but she loved the experience so much, that she gave up the whole idea of being an actor. She has since gone on to become an award-winning writer of picture books and novels and is published both in Australia and overseas.
