Joseph Delaney is a british young adult fantasy author, most noted for his series "Wardstone Chronicles" which is known in the USA as "The Last Apprentice".
Joseph was born and grew up in city of Preston, Lancashire in the North West of England. During his childhood joseph had a re-occurring nightmare in which he was sitting on the carpet in the front room of his home while his mother was knitting. All of a sudden, everything would become cold and a shadow-thing would come up from the coal cellar, pick him up and carry him back towards the dark.
While most people experience re-occurring dreams and nightmares, what makes this spookier is that his brothers experienced the same nightmare.
After leaving school Joseph attended Lancaster University and then became an English teacher before working to establish the Media and Film Studies department at Blackpool Sixth Form College.
Joseph's writing career began with the publication of a science fiction book which was written under the pen name of J.K. Haderack however it wasn't until he wrote his first young adult fantasy novel, The Spooks Apprentice (published under his own name) that his writing career really took off. After the second novel in the series was published, he retired as a teacher to dedicate his full time to writing.
Since then, Joseph has released further 4 novels in the Wardstone series, with the series being published in 24 countries with 3 novels being short-listed for the Lancashire children's Book for the Year Award. The Spooks Apprentice spent 7 weeks in the best seller charts and the series have sold over 1 million copies.
Over the pond in the USA, the series was released under the name of "The Last Apprentice" with the first volume, called "Revenge of the Witch" being turned into a film by Warner Bros.
Josephs novels are firmly rooted in Lancashire's rich folklore, mythology and geography and he has a real talent of combining real world location, folklore, fantasy and elements of horror into a wonderfully rich and inventive series of novels. Also evident is the amount of research into Lancashire Folklore that Joseph has obviously gone to which enriches his story.
The locations of the series mirror areas in Lancashire, with the "County" being Lancashire itself, "Caster" being Lancaster, "Preistown" being Preston, "The Black Pool" blackpool and "Chipenden" the little village of Chipping.
