Cora Taylor

Cora Taylor is one of Canada's best-known children's authors. She has published more than a dozen juvenile novels. Cora's Coteau titles include the very successful "Ghost Voyages" series and the "Spy Who Wasn't There" series, which includes Adventures in Istanbul and Murder in Mexico as well as her latest book, Chaos in China. Other recent titles include On Wings of Evil and several 'Our Canadian Girl' titles.

Cora Taylor's books have won several awards, including the Canada Council of Children's Literature Prize, the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year Award, the Ruth Schwartz Book Award and Alberta's R. Ross Annett Award for Children's Literature, the Red Cedar Readers' Choice Award, and most recently, the Golden Eagle Readers' Choice Award. Cora was born and raised in Saskatchewan. She now divides her time between Edmonton, Ontario and Florida. In fall 2008, she toured Prince Edward Island as a part of the Canadian Children's Book Centre's TD Canadian Children's Book Week 2008.

From the author:

There are lots of reasons why I became a writer. One version has to do with an aunt, my mother's older sister, who died before I was born. Our home was filled with pictures of this beautiful young woman in a wedding dress and I heard stories about her all the time. She came to be almost a fairy tale character to me. She was buried in the family plot in her wedding dress as was the custom then. To add to her legend, I was told that her grieving husband had gone to Lake of the Woods in Ontario where they had spent their honeymoon to have her tombstone made from a rock they used to sit beside. Since his last name was Love, that was the word the filled the top of this stone. Enough for any child to create a fairy tale. One day when I was snooping through my grandmother's desk I came upon a bundle of her letters home. Reading them, my fairy tale princess suddenly became a real person. She was warm and she was very funny – and suddenly she was alive to me. At that moment I realized how people you've never met can reach out and touch you. It was something I might have figured out from the books I read but it took this very personal situation to make me want to be a writer and reach people I would never get to know.