Gene Kemp

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Gene Kemp (December 27, 1926) is a British author best known for her children's books.

She grew up in Staffordshire, and her first job was teaching.

From 1972 she wrote stories for young writers about a pig named Tamworth, named after the town she grew up in.

Her best known book was The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler which was published by Penguin Books in 1977. This book, set in the fictional Cricklepit School, charts the pleasures and pains of friendship and growing up. There are several Cricklepit books including Snaggletooth's Mystery, an alternative history of the school, and Gowie Corby Plays Chicken, a book set a year after The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler, referencing Tyke in several chapters.

She has also written ghost and fantasy stories as well as realistic fiction like Seriously Weird which is told from the perspective of the sister of a young man with Asperger syndrome.

She won the Carnegie Medal and the Children's Rights Award for Tyke Tyler, as well as being shortlisted for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize four times, in 1981, 1985, 1986 and 1990. She has also turned her work into plays, the most successful and well-known of which is Charlie Lewis Plays for Time, another Cricklepit story. She now lives in Exeter.