Candy Gourlay writes children's and young-adult novels that pull Philippine history and folklore into the heart of British children's publishing. Her 2018 novel Bone Talk was shortlisted for both the Costa Children's Book Award and the Carnegie Medal, and the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported that she was the first Filipino writer to reach the Carnegie shortlist.

Before she wrote fiction she was a journalist in Manila in the 1980s, working at an opposition paper during the years of the People Power revolution that ended the Marcos dictatorship. She moved to London, raised a family, and broke into children's books only after years of rejection, arriving through a competition for new writers. That long apprenticeship shows in how surely the books are built.

Her debut, Tall Story (2010), about a Filipino boy and the half-sister who has never met him until he arrives in London, was shortlisted for the Waterstones and Blue Peter prizes and won children's book awards on both sides of the world. The ghost story Shine followed in 2013. With Bone Talk she turned to history, setting the novel among the Bontok people of the Cordilleras in 1899, on the eve of the American colonization of the Philippines.

She has kept mining that vein. Wild Song (2023), a companion to Bone Talk, follows an Igorot young woman taken to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where Filipinos were displayed as a colonial exhibit. The books hand young readers a version of Philippine history that British classrooms rarely teach, told from the inside rather than from the colony's edge.

Her recurring subjects are migration and belonging, Filipino folklore, and the colonial history that shaped both, published over more than a decade by David Fickling Books. Gourlay has become one of the most visible Filipino voices in British children's literature, and for a list of living Filipino authors, she is the bridge between Manila and the London bookshelf.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.