Head Shots by Darko Sikman
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Well, aside from a few years when I wanted to be an actor. Specifically I wanted to play Anita in West Side Story. There were only three problems: I couldn’t sing; I couldn’t dance; and I could only passably act.
I turned my sights to TV and got my start feeding cast and crew muffins and bologna sandwiches on the award-winning television series, Degrassi Junior High. They hated my food (a fact that’s memorialized forever in a poem the cast wrote: “An ode to Susin, the Bran Muffin Queen, we eat them, we die, then we turn green”). But luckily for me, they saw a spark in a spec script I wrote, and I went on to pen 16 episodes of Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High. I also got my first crack at novel writing when I wrote Shane, Wheels, Snake and Melanie – four books in the Degrassi series. I vowed that one day I would write an original young adult novel; it just took me a really long time!
In the meantime, the TV world kept me busy. I’ve written for a lot of Canadian TV shows, and still do. If you’re curious, you can see my full list of TV credits on IMDB. And yes, I’ve met quite a few Canadian celebrities. But no, I have not met Drake.
Finally I got off my butt and wrote that young adult novel, Word Nerd. It was published in fall 2008 by Tundra Books. My second novel, Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom was published by Tundra in fall 2010, and The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen was published in fall 2012. In spring of 2015 my novel, We Are All Made of Molecules, was published in Canada, the US and the UK, followed up by Optimists Die First, which was published in 2017. No Fixed Address came out in September, 2018.
My books have been translated into French (European and Quebec editions), German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Romanian, Turkish, Spanish, Japanese and Ukrainian. You can check out some of the foreign covers (including the wonderful UK covers) here.
I live in Vancouver, Canada, with my family and two destructive, naughty cats. When I’m not writing, I love to road bike, swim badly, be in the great outdoors, read and travel. And I’ve been known to laugh at my own jokes.