The School for Thieves: A Guest Post by Peter Burns

A resourceful young pickpocket named Tom is invited to a prestigious boarding school of thievery and tricks in the snowy Alps. But nothing is as it seems in the Shadow League as Tom races to uncover its dark secrets in this edge-of-your-seat adventure. Read on for an exclusive essay from Peter Burns on writing The School for Thieves, the overall winner of the 2026 Children's & YA Book Awards!

 

A young pickpocket gets recruited into an elite group of thieves in this “page-turning, edge-of-the-seat” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) upper middle grade boarding school adventure full of heists, danger, and secret plots perfect for fans of Spy School and Keeper of the Lost Cities.

I wanted to be a writer before I could even write. I remember drawing pictures of Transformers and fairytale characters and Superman next to squiggled lines instead of text and stapling them all together to create my first books. So much of my childhood was spent reading and writing stories, listening to audiobooks and dreaming that one day I might write my own children’s novel. I had a few attempts in my teens and early twenties and they weren’t very good (they were terrible); I could never quite translate the concept I had in my mind onto the page. I eventually (kind of accidentally) became a sports writer and have written eleven non-fiction books to date, but always in the background, in quiet moments, I continued writing children’s fiction. Indeed, for ten years, I was writing The School for Thieves. To finally see all that work come to fruition is truly a dream come true.

The idea first came to me when I was on holiday with my two oldest kids in Highland Perthshire in Scotland. We were staying in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by gorgeous mountains and thick forests of pine and fir trees and I remember thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a secret school here—for criminals.”

The idea marinated for a long time. Eventually the location for the school moved from Scotland to the Alps. That school then became four schools dotted around the world, with each one teaching a different criminal discipline—how to be a Thief, a Spy, an Assassin or a Politico—and the graduates from these schools would go on to work for an international criminal organisation called the Shadow League. As I began to plot the kind of action that might occur in a world like this, the central character emerged almost fully formed in my mind. Daring, brave—and sometimes rash—Tom Morgan has always felt intensely real to me.

The tone and action in the of series are, without doubt, inspired by the movies and books I watched and read as a child: James Bond, Indiana Jones, The Goonies, classic boarding school capers and golden age murder mysteries. Furthermore, I’ve always loved stories set in alternative timelines. I read Fatherland by Robert Harris when I was 14 and was blown away by it, just as I was by Lyra’s Oxford in The Golden Compass and Nathanial’s London in The Amulet of Samarkand. The concept of a familiar setting that is just slightly off isso intriguing as a backdrop for a novel or a movie and it was something I wanted to explore in the series. In the alternative history underpinning The School for Thieves, France won the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the Seven Years War in North America to become the dominant global power alongside the kingdom of Prussia and the Japanese Empire. To borrow from Terry Pratchett, this meant the world we are reading about went down a different leg in the trousers of time to get to where we are now in the story.

The School for Thieves is therefore a combination of everything I loved growing up—action-packed heists, a mysterious world full of intrigue, and a band of mismatched friends who’d do anything for each other. I wanted to create a story with heart-stopping adventure and daring challenges, yet one grounded in personal sacrifice and belonging. I hope it captures young imaginations and steals their hearts as much as it claimed mine while writing it.