Born in Kampala and educated in England, Sally Lloyd-Jones studied art history and French at Sussex and the Sorbonne before spending several years in children’s book publishing at Oxford University Press. She moved to the United States in 1989 and has written from Manhattan ever since, though the ear remains recognisably British.
She has more than thirty books for children to her name, from picture book comedy to devotional writing, and a place on the New York Times bestseller list. A single work, though, changed everything. The Jesus Storybook Bible, published in 2007 with illustrations by Jago, retells the scriptures for young children as a single continuous story rather than a set of moral lessons, under the subtitle that became its calling card: every story whispers his name.
It has sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages. What readers tend to remark on is the writing itself, warm, rhythmic and entirely unpatronising, the work of someone who trusts children with beauty.
3 hours and 23 minutes
