Vashti Hardy Books in Order

If you want sky-ship adventure first: Brightstorm → Darkwhispers
If you want invention, grief, and big science-fantasy ideas: WildSpark → Crowfall
If you want shorter mystery adventures: The Griffin Gate → The Puffin Portal → The Raven Riddle
If you want a younger illustrated series: Harley Hitch and the Iron Forest

Vashti Hardy was born in Sussex, England, and she now divides her time between Sussex and Lancashire. She writes children's adventures packed with maps, machines, ghosts, skyships, and determined young people who usually end up in far more danger than they expected. Even when her worlds are fantastical, they tend to run on very human things, grief, curiosity, friendship, and the need to keep asking questions.

She came to writing through classrooms as much as through books.

Hardy worked as a primary school teacher for several years, and that background still shows in the way she thinks about stories and young readers. She has a first-class honours teaching degree with an English specialism and later completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. She has often spoken about her interest in free-writing, journals, and giving children room to invent whole worlds on the page.

Some of the earliest pushes toward writing came when she was young. She has said that teachers mattered hugely to her, from those who took her class to the local library to the teacher who read stories aloud and the secondary English teacher who introduced writing journals. She has also pointed to a read-aloud of Rebecca's World when she was about seven as the moment books really grabbed her. For a child whose imagination did a lot of the travelling, that mattered.

Before becoming known as an author, she left teaching and worked in copywriting and digital marketing while keeping her own fiction going in the background. That practical side seems to suit her books. Hardy has described building a fantasy world with maps and pictures first, then using music to find the right mood for a scene. The result is adventurous fiction that feels carefully made without ever feeling over-engineered.

Readers often meet her through Brightstorm, the opening book in a skyship adventure series about twins Arthur and Maudie chasing the truth about their explorer father. Its follow-up, Darkwhispers, widens the map and deepens the family mystery. WildSpark shifts into stranger territory, asking what grief looks like in a world where spirits can be housed in mechanical animals. Crowfall brings in island adventure and ecological danger, while The Griffin Gate and Harley Hitch and the Iron Forest show how comfortably she can move between longer middle grade and shorter, more accessible adventures.

Her range is wider than one kind of adventure.

Across these books, Hardy returns again and again to invention, exploration, found family, and big moral questions. Her protagonists are often builders, thinkers, or children who notice the thing adults have decided not to notice. She likes worlds that sit somewhere between old and new, part steampunk, part science fantasy, part quest story. She also makes plenty of room for girls who tinker, fix, design, and lead, without turning that into a speech every few pages.

Success arrived quickly, but in a grounded way. WildSpark won the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story in 2020 and the FCBG Children's Book Awards. Brightstorm was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, and The Griffin Gate was later shortlisted for the FCBG Children's Book Award. Those facts help explain why her books travel so well, but the real draw is simpler: they move fast, care about their characters, and take young readers seriously.

Now that she spends her time writing and visiting schools, Hardy still keeps one foot close to the classroom through talks and workshops. That feels fitting. She is the sort of writer who clearly remembers what it means for a child to find the one book that opens a door. Her fiction has plenty of gears and grand adventures, but underneath it all is a simple belief that imagination can make young readers braver, more curious, and more ready to build something of their own.