Chicken House

About Chicken House

Chicken House is a British children's fiction publisher based in Frome, Somerset, founded in 2000 by Barry Cunningham, the editor who had earlier acquired J. K. Rowling's first Harry Potter novel at Bloomsbury, and owned by Scholastic since 2005.

Cunningham set up the company with his deputy Rachel Hickman. In his own account its first home was with Egmont UK, and Scholastic Inc. soon became its American partner before buying the business outright in 2005, with Chicken House keeping its own identity as a small Somerset team. Its books are sold in the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Early successes included launching the novels of Kevin Brooks worldwide and bringing Cornelia Funke's German novels to English readers, which gave the company its first New York Times bestsellers. It also took on the Tunnels series by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams after its self-published start, and James Dashner's Maze Runner books, for which it is the UK publisher. Other authors on its list include Lucy Christopher (Stolen, 2009), Kiran Millwood Hargrave (The Girl of Ink & Stars, 2016), M. G. Leonard, whose debut Beetle Boy appeared in 2016, and Jasbinder Bilan, who won its fiction competition in 2017 with Asha & the Spirit Bird.

With The Times it runs the annual Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition for unpublished, unagented writers, whose winner receives a publishing contract.