Pullman was born in Norwich, Norfolk, England, to RAF pilot Alfred Outram and Audrey Evelyn Merrifield. The family travelled with his father's job, including to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he spent time at school. His father was killed in a plane crash in 1953 when Pullman was seven. His mother remarried and with a move to Australia came Pullman's discovery of comic books including Superman and Batman, a medium which he continues to espouse. From 1957 he was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy school in Harlech, Gwynedd and spent time in Norfolk with his grandfather, a clergyman. Around this time Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost, which would become a major influence for His Dark Materials. From 1963 Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third class BA in 1968, in an interview with the Oxford Student he stated that "he did not really enjoy the English course" and that "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realised that I wasn’t — it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I’d have got one of those". He discovered William Blake's illustrations around 1970, which would also later influence him greatly Pullman married Judith Speller in 1970 and began teaching children and writing school plays. His first published work was The Haunted Storm, which joint-won the New English Library's Young Writer's Award in 1972. He nevertheless refuses to discuss it. Galatea, an adult fantasy-fiction novel, followed in 1978, but it was his school plays which inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein, in 1982. He stopped teaching around the publication of The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), his second children's book, whose Victorian setting is indicative of Pullman's interest in that era. Pullman taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford between 1988 and 1996, continuing to write children's stories. He began His Dark Materials about 1993. Northern Lights (published as The Golden Compass in the US) was published in 1996 and won the Carnegie Medal, one of the most prestigious British children's fiction awards, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. Pullman has been writing full-time since 1996, but continues to deliver talks and writes occasionally for The Guardian. He was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004. Pullman also began lecturing at a seminar in English at his alma mater, Exeter College, Oxford, in 2004. He is currently working on The Book of Dust, a sequel to his completed His Dark Materials trilogy.

Since 1999, Scott Brick has recorded nearly 300 audiobooks. While work for Books on Tape represents almost 50% of his output, this tireless reader worked for virtually every audio publisher in 2006. Among the 25+ audiobooks he recorded last year, he delivered outstanding performances for Audio Renaissance (Joseph Finder’s Killer Instinct), Blackstone (Robert Littell’s Vicious Circle), Brilliance (Alex Kershaw’s The Few), Hachette (Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire), Penguin (Clive Cussler’s Skeleton Coast) and Random House (Lincoln Child’s Deep Storm). PW’s review of his 2006 reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood said, “Brick’s surefooted performance is nothing short of stunning. This facile audio actor delivers an award-worthy performance.” native of Southern California, Scott has been an actor (among other things) since leaving UCLA in the late 1980s. “I spent about 10 years in a traveling Shakespeare company, doing dozens of shows all over the state,” quoth “The Brickman,” as he sometimes calls himself. “I guess I’ve had a pretty solid grounding in the classics, as well as contemporary work. Beyond that, I’ve been a fan of old-time radio my entire life and have always been passionate about the spoken word. That’s the reason I wanted to be an actor, because I’m so fanatic about telling stories. And audiobooks are the purest form of doing that, aren’t they?”

Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina, and for the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec. She is one of only fifty forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and is on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. A professor of anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr. Reichs is a native of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. at Northwestern. She now divides her time between Charlotte and Montreal and is a frequent expert witness in criminal trials. Her work as a forensic anthropologist is internationally recognized. She has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide, helped identify individuals from mass graves in Guatemala, and done forensic work at Ground Zero in New York. For her work with CILHI she has identified war dead from World War II; from all of Southeast Asia – she even examined the remains from the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Since 1999, Scott Brick has recorded nearly 300 audiobooks. While work for Books on Tape represents almost 50% of his output, this tireless reader worked for virtually every audio publisher in 2006. Among the 25+ audiobooks he recorded last year, he delivered outstanding performances for Audio Renaissance (Joseph Finder’s Killer Instinct), Blackstone (Robert Littell’s Vicious Circle), Brilliance (Alex Kershaw’s The Few), Hachette (Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire), Penguin (Clive Cussler’s Skeleton Coast) and Random House (Lincoln Child’s Deep Storm). PW’s review of his 2006 reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood said, “Brick’s surefooted performance is nothing short of stunning. This facile audio actor delivers an award-worthy performance.” native of Southern California, Scott has been an actor (among other things) since leaving UCLA in the late 1980s. “I spent about 10 years in a traveling Shakespeare company, doing dozens of shows all over the state,” quoth “The Brickman,” as he sometimes calls himself. “I guess I’ve had a pretty solid grounding in the classics, as well as contemporary work. Beyond that, I’ve been a fan of old-time radio my entire life and have always been passionate about the spoken word. That’s the reason I wanted to be an actor, because I’m so fanatic about telling stories. And audiobooks are the purest form of doing that, aren’t they?”