Born in 1979 in Norwich, England, Alexander Gordon Smith began to write his first stories at the age of six. After leaving school he started writing non-fiction, including several children's books on space and geography and hundreds of articles for various magazines and partworks.

Between 2000 and 2003 he studied English literature at the University of East Anglia, where he set up a small poetry press called Egg Box Publishing. Egg Box published a number of new poets, including Richard Evans, Ramona Herdman and poetry collective Aisle16, and continues to add to its list of books.

In October 2004, Smith published a creative writing guide, "Inspired Creative Writing", for Infinite Ideas Ltd. A followup guide, "Writing Bestselling Children's Books" was published in July 2007 [1].

Novels for Children

In Summer 2005, Smith and his nine-year-old brother Jamie Webb began writing The Inventors(ISBN 0571233104), a children's novel. The book was shortlisted for The Wow Factor, a national competition run by Waterstones and Faber and Faber publishers, and although it lost out to Sarah Wray's The Forbidden Room it was taken on by Faber and published in April 2007. The sequel, The Inventors and the City of Stolen Souls(ISBN 978-0571238439), was published in June 2008.

In November 2008 The Bookseller magazine reported that Faber signed a new series of books by Smith, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing it in the US. Furnace is a horror series for teenagers set in a prison for young offenders. The first three books, Furnace: Lockdown, Furnace: Solitary and Furnace: Death Sentence, were released in 2009, with the fourth, Death Sentence, released in October 2010 and the fifth, Execution, in March 2011.

Smith lives in Norwich, Norfolk.