Born: 17th October 1971
Episodes Broadcast: 2016

Patrick Ness was born at Fort Belvoir, Virginia in the United States, but his father's army career prompted the family's move to Hawaii and then Washington state. He left home to attend the University of Southern California, where he completed a degree in English literature. Ness was soon hired to write for a cable company, but he aspired to move into creative writing, and he sold a short story to the magazine Genre in 1997. He then moved to London, where he taught creative writing at Oxford University for three years and provided criticism for several newspapers. Ness' first novel, The Crash Of Hennington, was published by Flamingo in 2003. An anthology entitled Topics About Which I Know Nothing followed in 2004, a year before he became a British citizen. However, it was Ness' move into young adult fiction with 2008's The Knife Of Never Letting Go that he began to attract substantial acclaim. He became just the second author ever to receive the Carnegie Medal in consecutive years, winning in 2011 for Monsters Of Men and in 2012 for A Monster Calls.

Ness' first professional connection with Doctor Who came in 2013, when he wrote the Fifth Doctor short story Tip Of The Tongue, which was initially released as an e-book from Puffin Books. Two years later, it was announced that he would be spearheading a new Doctor Who spin-off called Class. It would premiere in 2016, the same year that Ness scripted the movie adaptation of A Monster Calls, starring Liam Neeson, Sigourney Weaver and Felicity Jones. He served as the executive producer of Class and wrote all eight episodes, but sadly it was not deemed a success. Having initially premiered on the digital channel BBC Three, when Class finally debuted on terrestrial television it was relegated to an ignominious late-night timeslot on BBC One. Despite the BBC's decision to cancel Class after a single season, Ness nonetheless provided input when Big Finish Productions decided to revisit it as a series of audio dramas starting in 2018.

In 2021, Ness collaborated with Christopher Ford on the screenplay for the Daisy Ridley/Tom Holland movie Chaos Walking, which adapted The Knife Of Never Letting Go. The following year, he wedded Nick Coveney, who worked in publishing; Ness had been married once before, but the relationship had ended in divorce.