Chris Wooding was born in Leicester in 1977 and studied English Literature at Sheffield University. Chris has always wanted to be a writer, ever since ever. He grew up on a diet of C.S.Lewis, Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, Terry Brooks and innumerable horror writers, which pretty much shaped his tastes for fantasy and sci-fi. He started writing books at about sixteen, and survived two wintry years of being generally ignored before one of his horror/sci-fi novels was taken on by an agent. He still maintains that it could have been a contender had not Species come out a few months after he wrote it, which had near-on exactly the same plot.

Crashing was his first attempt at writing a teenage novel, based loosely on real-life people and events of his teens. He wrote it during a lazy summer holiday when he was nineteen, because he had nothing better to do with his time.

When he's not writing Chris enjoys listening to punk and SKA and watching diabolically bad horror films. He possesses the uncanny ability of being able to predict who will die and in what order after seeing only the first five minutes of these movies. He also loves cheesy Japanese animated videos, and plays in a couple of SKA-punk bands