A. M. Dassu

A. M. DASSU is a former World Book Day author and internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of sixteen books, including Boy, Everywhere, Fight Back and Kicked Out, which have collectively been listed for over fifty five awards, including the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, The Week Junior Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Indie Book Awards, the Little Rebels Award for Radical Fiction, the American Library Association Notable Book List and Jane Addams Peace Book Award.

She is a director at Inclusive Minds, which is an organisation for people who are passionate about inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children’s literature; a patron of The Other Side of Hope, a literary magazine edited by immigrants and refugees, which celebrates the refugee and immigrant communities worldwide, and one of The National Literacy Trust’s Connecting Stories campaign authors, aiming to help inspire a love of reading and writing in children and young people.

A. M. Dassu grew up in the Midlands dreaming of becoming a writer but studied economics instead and worked in marketing and project management before realising her dream. She writes books that challenge stereotypes, humanise the ‘other’ and are full of empathy, hope and heart. Her novels inspired by news stories, are about ordinary people who do extraordinary things when thrown into circumstances they never saw coming.

She enjoys planning school workshops and shocking her audience by taking a story we think we all know and turning it on its head. She is an experienced presenter who has delivered speeches and workshops to thousands of people. She was the keynote speaker at the 2026 First Story Young Writers Festival at Cambridge University.