Robert Muchamore

Early life

Robert Muchamore was born in Tufnell Park, North London, and is the youngest of four children. Muchamore grew up in Tufnell Park]] and attended St. Johns Upper Holloway and Acland Burghley School, leaving with a D in A-Level Economics and aspired to be either an architect, photographer or writer. After realising training as an architect would require "too much work," and a Saturday job in Jessops put him off being a photographer, he turned to writing. However, when he found his writing was not to a quality he would have liked, he gave up and secured a job as an office junior for a private investigation firm in 1991. He describes the 1990s for him as "pretty dull".

CHERUB

Robert Muchamore started writing the CHERUB novels because his nephew in Australia could not find any novels that he liked reading. He tried to write novels that he would have enjoyed reading when he was an adolescent, a time when he remembers being too old for children's novels but not old enough to read adult novels.

The CHERUB series follows the life of a character named James Adams (formerly James Choke) and his younger half-sister Lauren Adams (formerly Lauren Onions), a member of CHERUB (Charles Henderson's Espionage Research Unit B), a top-secret branch of the British Secret Service. The organisation recruits orphaned children and trains them as spies. Once qualified, they are used to investigate targets ranging from international terrorists to gang leaders. As children, they are considered innocent by their targets. CHERUB agents start basic training at the age of ten. Basic Training is a gruelling, tiresome 100-day course that prepares CHERUBs for the dangers they could face during missions. CHERUB agents are then eligible for missions upon completion. Once passed basic training, agents take part in missions, before retiring at the age of seventeen.

Muchamore has written and published seventeen CHERUB novels and a World Book Day novella.

The CHERUB series has been sold in more than twenty different countries and has won various awards. Most notably, The Recruit has won eight literature awards.

Henderson's Boys

Muchamore has authored a second series of novels about the origins of CHERUB entitled Henderson's Boys. The first, The Escape, was released on 5 February 2009 in the UK. Six novels followed, with the seventh and final novel, Scorched Earth, being released in February 2013.

The Henderson's Boys novels are set during World War II and follow Charles Henderson, a British secret agent, as he creates the organisation later featured in the CHERUB series. The novels centre around four children: Marc Kilgour, Paul Clarke, Rosie Clarke, and PT Bivott.

CHERUB: Series 2 (Aramov)

The second series of CHERUB books is subtitled Aramov, so-called because the antagonists of the first three books of the series are the Aramov Clan. The first novel, People's Republic, was released in August 2011. Guardian Angel was released in September 2012, Black Friday was released in September 2013, and Lone Wolf was released in September 2014. The final book in the series, New Guard, was released in June 2016.

Rock War

In 2014 it was announced that he would be writing another novel, Rock War, which has no connection to CHERUB or Henderson Boys. It was published on 27 February 2014, and follows the story of Jay, Summer and Dylan entering a musical competition. A novella titled The Audition was released for World Book Day 2014. The second book in the series, Boot Camp, was published in October 2015. The third book in the series, Gone Wild, was published in October 2016, while the fourth book in the series, Crash Landing, will be published in October 2017. This is expected to be the final book in the series.

Other novels

Home is another novel written by Robert Muchamore. It was deemed too violent to be published by any children's publisher that Muchamore approached, so it was never published. The story follows civil war in an unstated central African state, but most probably the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The full novel has been released by the author online.

In between writing The Recruit and Class A, Muchamore wrote a novel called Little Criminals. He posted the first two chapters onto the CHERUB series official forum, to see what his fans thought. Unlike Home, Muchamore has not published the rest of the text on his fan forum because he still holds out some hope that it will be published.

Killer T is Muchamore's first standalone novel, and will be published September 2018.