Ella West lives on a small sheep farm in Otago, New Zealand with her husband and two teenage sons. She started writing plays for children for the New Zealand School Journal but soon crossed over to fiction and her first teen novel Thieves was published in 2006. Since then she has also written several adult plays including The Middlemarch Singles Ball. She enjoys writing for children and teenagers because anything can happen in a story for children. There's always magic. West was awarded the Louis Johnson New Writers' Bursary in 2006 and Thieves was a finalist in the 2007 New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and was listed as a Storylines Notable Young Adult Fiction Book.