Norton Juster was born in New York State in 1929 and grew up (carefully) in Brooklyn, studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and spent a year in Liverpool on a Fulbright Scholarship. After spending three years in the US Navy, he practiced architecture in New York and Massachusetts before teaching architecture and planning. His work includes The Dot and the Line, which was made into an animated film, and a musical adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth.
DIANA WYNNE JONES was born in August 1934 in London, where she had a chaotic and unsettled childhood against the background of World War II.
The family moved around a lot, finally settling in rural Essex. As children, Diana and her two sisters were deprived of a good, steady supply of books by a father, 'who could beat Scrooge in a meanness contest'. So, armed with a vivid imagination and an insatiable quest for good books to read, she decided that she would have to write them herself.