Jean Ure's young adult books combine her lively sense of humor with unique stories that often contain off-beat situations and characters. Ure is a vegetarian who is avid about animal rights, and while her books make references to these tendencies among her characters, they are never preachy. Class struggles, homosexuality, sexual awakenings, and feminism are also among her topics, all of which she discusses with freshness and immediacy.

Ure does not remember a time when she did not want to be a writer. Born in Surrey, England, as a young girl she would steal notebooks from her school to fill them with imaginative stories. "I was brought up in a tradition of writing, inasmuch as my father's family were inveterate ode writers, sending one another long screeds of poetry on every possible occasion," Ure recalled in an essay for Something About the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS). She was...