Karleen Bradford

Karleen Bradford is the award-winning author of 24 books for children and young adults. Her topics include historical fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. Her historical novel, There Will be Wolves, won the CLA Young Adult Canadian Book Award, was selected by the Children's Librarians of the Toronto Public Library as "One of the 100 Best Canadian Books for Today's Children and Teens," and received an American Library Association Best Book citation. Other awards include the Saskatchewan Young Readers' Choice Shining Willow Award and her books have been shortlisted for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award, the OLA Silver Birch Award and the Red Cedar Award.

Karleen has always tried to travel to the places she writes about while researching her books. While writing With Nothing But Our Courage, she travelled through Lake Champlain into Québec and up the St. Lawrence along the route Mary MacDonald and her family would have taken. For A Desperate Road to Freedom, she visited Virginia and mapped out the trail Julia May and her family might have followed to Canada. For her latest Dear Canada book A Country of Our Own, set in Ottawa in 1866-67, didn't involve as much travelling, but it offered a fascinating journey into the past of this great city.

Karleen now lives in Brechin, Ontario, near Orillia.