From childhood, David Hardie loved telling stories. While still at school, he won a competition to have a play he had written produced by the BBC.

After school, David worked as a sculptor and woodcarver, creating displays for tourist attractions and shopping centres as well as hand modelling many thousands of figures for model villages across the UK.

In more recent years, David has written and produced two feature films.

While his children were young, he told them stories of the Dittos, invisible elf-like creatures who live in the seaside town of Dawlish, helping to look after the wildlife and clean up after visitors.

Working with his sister, Diana Townsend, David used these stories as the basis for the books in the series The Dittos of Dawlish.