Susan Cooper (born 1935) is an author mostly of fantasy novels and started her career as a journalist under Ian Fleming. She later emigrated to the United States. She describes being restricted by blackouts as something that led to her reading a lot more than she might otherwise have done, she also says that it gave her a sense of good and evil that translated into her work. I love this quote from an interview where she talks about her early writing, "I read endlessly, wrote plays for a puppet theatre operated by the boy next door, and decided at 14 that since adults clearly didn’t understand the young, I should write my autobiography, which would be called Fourteen. It went very slowly, however, and by the time the title had changed to Sixteen I gave up the idea." She was lectured by Tolkien and describes him and CS Lewis as teaching her and others to believe in dragons. This interview has lots of good information, I also really like the story about how she came to write Over Sea, Under Stone, aiming to enter a family adventures story competition before it morphed into fantasy.