Alan Bradley

Alan Bradley is a distinguished Canadian author, best known for his mystery novels. Born in 1938, he spent his high school years reading at the cemetery instead of socializing. His professional background is in electronic engineering, which he utilized while working at various radio and television stations in Ontario and at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. He later became the Director of Television Engineering in the media center at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, where he remained for 25 years before retiring early to pursue writing full-time in 1994.

Bradley's writing career took off when he began writing children's stories that were published in The Canadian Children's Annual. He also wrote a short story titled 'Meet Miss Mullen,' which won the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for Children's Literature. In addition to his work for children, Bradley has written for literary journals, taught scriptwriting and television production courses, and given public readings in schools and galleries. He was also a founding member of The Casebook of Saskatoon, a society devoted to the study of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlockian writings.

Bradley gained significant fame with his Flavia de Luce series, which began with 'The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie' in 2007. The book went on to win multiple awards, including the Debut Dagger Award of the Crimewriter's Association, the Agatha Award for Best First Novel, the Dilys Award, the Spotted Owl Award, and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. The series features an 11-year-old chemist and wannabe detective named Flavia de Luce, set in the 1950s English countryside.

Bradley currently resides in Malta with his wife Shirley and two calculating cats. His seventh Flavia de Luce mystery, 'As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust,' was published in the US, Canada, and the UK in 2015. He has also published a memoir, 'The Shoebox Bible,' and a short story featuring Flavia de Luce, 'The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse.'