SYLVIA McNICOLL was born in Ontario but grew up in Montreal, Quebec. She graduated from Concordia with a BA specialization in English, minor in economics, while working daytime in corporate finance. It took her about 10 years to recover from her education and the inferiority complex that studying English literature gave her. She was somehow left with the idea that you needed to be dead, British and use plenty of ‘thees’ and thous’ to be a great writer. When she stayed at home to raise her three children and took Paul Kropp’s Writing for Children Course at Sheridan College, she discovered Canadian children’s literature to be moving and exciting without the use of Shakespearean English. Her project for that class turned out to be her first published novel, Blueberries and Whipped Cream (Gage Jeanpac1988).

Fourteen years and many books later, Sylvia has won the 1996 Silver Birch Award and the 1997 Manitoba Young Reader’s Choice for Bringing Up Beauty, the 2000 Explora Toy Children’s Novel Award for Caught in a Lie as well as Our Choice Awards for all her trade novels and is shortlisted for the 2001 Red Cedar Award for Grave Secrets. She has written short stories, first chapter, middle school, reluctant reader and young adult novels, series fiction under a pseudonym, developmental work for the National Film Board, as well as an adult non-fiction “Coles Notes.” She is currently working on a sequel to Bringing Up Beauty where the reader meets Elizabeth again raising Beauty II, as well as watches Kyle go blind and receive Elizabeth’s second Beauty.

Sylvia lives in Burlington and besides reading and writing she loves swimming, (waterslides are even better!), crosscountry skiing, cycling and inline skating.