Cynthia Harnett (22 June 1893 – 25 October 1981) was an English author and illustrator, mainly of children's books.
She is best known for six historical novels that feature ordinary teenage children involved in events of national significance, four of them in the 15th century.
[1][2] For one of them, The Wool-Pack (1951), she won the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.
[2] She illustrated the early editions of several of her own novels, but she also collaborated more than a dozen times with the painter and etcher George Vernon Stokes (1873–1954).
In the U.S. these six books were first published as The Great House (1968), Nicholas and the Wool-Pack (1953), The Drawbridge Gate (1953), Stars of Fortune (1956), Caxton's Challenge (1960), and The Writing on the Hearth (1973).