Leon Garfield was born in Brighton, England, on July 14, 1921. He wanted to become an artist, but his training was interrupted by his service in the Medical Corps during World War II. After the war he worked as a biochemist in hospitals for twenty years before deciding to write full-time. He has produced novels, short stories, and works of nonfiction, many of which are set in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. The God Beneath the Sea, a retelling of Greek myths, earned the 1970 British Library Association's Carnegie Medal for best children's book of the year published in the United Kingdom. Footsteps won the Whitbread Award of the British Booksellers Association for best children's book of 1980, and Smith was given the Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association in 1987.

Many of Garfield's novels cannot be strictly classified as adult or children's books. The majority are adventure tales...