Gabrielle is from the North East of England Her first job was in the video games industry where she worked on games for PC, Playstation and XBox She currently teaches computer games development at Teesside University where she runs the Animex festival of Animation and Computer Games and gets to meet all of her favourite game and animation creators.Growing up, she spent several wonderful summers running wild on her granny s farm in Galway, pretending to be one of the Famous Five with her brothers and cousins She has always loved exploring castles and in 2006 she visited Castle Coch in Wales As she looked at a carving of The Fates over one of the fireplaces, an idea for a story crept into her head When she got home she started typing the story of Alfie Bloom, the boy who inherited a castle.