We look at Kate Crozier, author of Dawndance is our author story of the week.

Kate Crozier was born in London and educated at Parliament Hill School for Girls, the Central School of Art (now Central St. Martins) and L'Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. 

Fascinated by dance from the moment she was taken to a cousin's ballet-school at the age of 3, she was enrolled in the "babies" class and continued to love the classes until the advent of WW2 meant that she spent much of her childhood in remote rural locations as a result of evacuation.

Parallel with this Kate loved to draw and paint, and won a national children's painting competition at the age of 10 and with dance classes not available in the various little villages where she spent the war years, drawing and painting became her creative outlet. By the end of the war, Kate had already grown too tall for a dance career, but continued with ballet classes for the love of it. 

It was only when her own daughter wanted to go to dance lessons that Kate thought of teaching dance, studied for a teaching qualification with the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing and eventually started her own school where she taught for 21 years.

Writing came much later, but her own experience of dance and of teaching it underlies her children's book "Dawndancer". The kind of dancing featured in the book is not ballet. In fact it is not made specific at all so that young readers are free to envisage whatever kind of dance they wish.

Recently, Kate had an exhibition that included many of her drawings of dancers, which led to an invitation to sketch during ballet classes at the local dance studios.

She is now working on "Dreamdancer", the sequel to "Dawndancer" and plotting a third book "Dunedancer" to complete the trilogy.