Danni Hannington

Danni is a creator at heart. Whether she is writing, building furniture from reclaimed timber, or bringing an entirely new idea into the world, she is most alive when making something that didn't exist before.

She lives on a houseboat on the Basingstoke Canal — part of a warm and wonderfully unlikely community of creative souls, artists and nine-to-fivers who have made a little floating world together. She shares that world with her wife, her son, a dog named Hephaestus, and four cats who have very strong opinions about everything. In the summer months she is regularly to be found rescuing baby ducklings who have tumbled into the lock overflow — which tells you most of what you need to know about her.

By day Danni works part time as a special needs assistant at a local infant school. It is there that the Wonderfully You series was born. Working closely with children who feel different, who struggle to be understood, who mask their feelings or feel overwhelmed by a world that wasn't quite built for them, Danni found herself searching for books that truly saw these children — not books that explained them or fixed them, but books that looked at them with a whole open heart and said: you are not broken. You are wonderfully you.

The children she works with were the first to hear these stories. Their faces were the reason she kept writing.

Wonderfully You is her debut series. It will not be her last.