Jenny Valentine

Jenny Valentine (born 1970) is an English children's novelist. For her first novel and best-known work, Finding Violet Park (HarperCollins, 2007), she won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers. with her husband singer/songwriter Alex Valentine, with whom she runs a health food shop in nearby Hay-on-Wye.

Writer HarperCollins has published Valentine's novels in Britain and usually one year later in America. Finding Violet Park (2007) was re-titled Me, The Missing and The Dead in the US (2008). Beside winning the Guardian Prize Basque, Catalan and Italian translations of the book were published in 2008, followed by versions in Dutch, French, German, Slovenian, Spanish, and Norwegian. and longlisted for the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize. By 2010 it had also been published in Dutch and German-language translations.

Valentine's third novel, The Ant Colony, was published in 2009. By 2011 it had been published in Dutch and in German translations. It was also her fourth novel nominated for the Carnegie Medal, i. e. it was one of the year's top forty children's books published in the UK, in the estimation of librarians.

Waterstone's Children's Book Prize shortlist