Sam Angus is a bestselling and award-winning author of historical adventure novels for children of nine and over. Her novels, required reading for schools across the United Kingdom, deal lightly with some of the bleakest moments of British and Colonial history.
Her first novel Soldier Dog, winner of the North East Book Award, and both shortlisted and longlisted for many others, including the CILIP Carnegie Award, is the story of a lonely and bullied underage recruit and the Messenger Dog Service in the First World War. The story of Stanley Ryder’s dog is based on the true story of Airedale Jack. Angus is currently collaborating on a script for a film based on this novel.
Captain, Angus's second WWI novel, is the story of the friendship between Captain, a young refugee from Central Europe and Billy, a member of the Worcestershire Yeomanry. Captain is recruited to the Mule Corps to serve alongside his donkey Hey-Ho carrying water up to the men fighting in the hills of Gallipoli. The friendship between these two under-age recruits is severely tested by the strains and stresses of the war: When Billy is promoted he turns away from his friend. Then Captain is wounded and loses his beloved Hey-Ho.
A Horse Called Hero, is the story of two child evacuees from London during World War II who, alone in the depths of the British countryside, discover an orphaned foal. Spurned by their new class mates, they gradually come to understand that their Father, a cavalry hero of the First World War, has been imprisoned for cowardice. This very popular story is set in the area of the West Country where Sam lives.
The House on Hummingbird Island, shortlisted and longlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Award, the Cheshire Schools Book Award and the Calderdale Award, is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the First World War, touching on issues of race, as well as the contribution of the West Indies to the war and their treatment at the hands of the British. As young Idie Grace sheds the skins of her childhood, she confronts the complex truths of her genetic inheritance.
Sam Angus's much anticipated fifth novel, School for Skylarks is to be published in July 2017. In 1939, at the outbreak of the blitz, young Lyla Spence has been torn from her Mother’s home in London and taken by her Father to Furlongs, the large and mysterious country home of her Great Aunt Ada. Lyla, who has never known a friend nor been to school, and whose parents have been at the centre of a scandalous divorce, is an angry, lonely child - lonely that is, until an entire school of girls suddenly arrives at Furlongs and turns her world inside out. Lyla tries to escape and hatches increasingly desperate plans while her Great Aunt takes it upon herself to lock the teachers up and take over the running of the school. Mayhem and mishap ensue and Lyla, meanwhile, learns what friends and family are for.
Sam Angus's books have been longlisted and shortlisted several times for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. Soldier Dog was longlisted in 2013, Captain in 2015 and The House on Hummingbird Island for 2017. She has also won or been shortlisted for many local and national awards including the North East Book Award, The Sussex Coast Amazing Book Award, the East Lothian Libraries’ Lennox Author Award, the James Reckitt Children’s Book Award, the Hillingdon Book of the Year, and the Bath and Somerset Centurion Award, amongst others, the Cheshire Book Award.
Sam Angus was born in Italy, and grew up in France, and spent much of her childhood moving from home to home and country to country, but most of her early childhood was spent in Franco's Spain. She went to more than ten different schools and was the naughtiest girl in all of them. She then went on to read English at Trinity College Cambridge, where she secretly kept a dog in her college rooms. After Cambridge she went to Central St Martins to study fashion then taught A Level English Literature for many years, before becoming a full-time writer. She lives between London and Exmoor and has five children, several horses and a handsome, stubborn West Highland terrier.
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