L.D. Sharpe has loved books for as long as she can remember - stories of adventure, of weird and wonderful places, and seeing the world through someone else's eyes. She studied languages and philosophy at Oxford and joined the Foreign Office straight out of university. She quickly moved across to the Department for International Development (DFID), where she spent time in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Sierra Leone. She left DFID to work for Her Majesty Queen Rania in Jordan, while spending much of her time bumping around the desert in a Land Rover.

After Jordan, she spent several years in a jungle camp in Gabon surrounded by elephants and humpback whales, which is where the Pelican Black books began. They took life as a way to record all the best bits of people she had met and places she had been, with a plot to make them much more exciting. L.D. Sharpe has always plausibly denied being a spy - but the books were written to show what that life might have been like.

She now lives with her family and two mad dogs in Namibia, growing giant kelp and running the Lüderitz Blue School.