Sally Lloyd-Jones is a British-born children's author living in New York. She moved to the States in 1989 'just for a year of two' and is still there. Born in Kampala, Uganda, raised in East and West Africa and at a boarding school in the New Forest, the first book she remembers reading all the way through was The Complete Nonsense by Edward Lear. Things have never been the same since. Sally worked in children's book publishing for several years where she came up with funny ideas for what books can do (pop, flap, bounce, rock, float, squeak, tick) and wrote stories and rhymes to go inside. In 2000, she left to write full-time and perfect her silliness. Handbag Friends is her first picture book. Sue Heap studied graphic design at Hull College of Art. She started her working life as a temporary store person dealing in valve components, before moving on to Yellow Pages where she designed layouts for such copy lines as (file under Plumber) "Mr Onion will fix your leak!" A move into the world of book design followed, beginning with school textooks and moving onto picture books at Walker, before going freelance, illustrating picture book texts, a number of which she has also written. These include Cowboy Baby, which won the Smarties Book Prize Gold Award in the picture book category. Sue and Sally first met at OUP in 1984. Then ten years later they met in New York for a brief chat about book ideas. Their career as Handbag Friends finally began in 2001.
