Eileen Kernaghan (1939 – )

. At age five, her mother taught her to read and she immediately started writing stories. When she was eight, she wrote a piece in which she borrowed more than heavily from "Alice in Wonderland." Her teacher was so taken with her tale that he asked for a copy. At a chance meeting thirty years later, during a writer's convention, the same teacher came up to her and told her he still had the copy.

When she was twelve, she wrote a story about a boy trapper and a wolverine. The Vancouver Sun newspaper bought it for twelve dollars and sixty-five cents. Big money in those days. Over the next twenty years she went to university, married and had three children. When her last child entered kindergarten, she decided Wednesday morning, from ten to twelve, would be her writing time and she sat down and began writing again.

Ms. Kernaghan's works include the award-winning "Grey Isles" trilogy of which Journey to Aprilioth, (1980) won a silver medal for original paperback fiction from 'The West Coast Review of Books'; and "Songs from the Drowned Lands," (1983) which won the Canadian Science fiction and Fantasy Award. The third book in the series, "The Sarsen Witch," was shortlisted for the same award. She also co-authored "Walking After Midnight" (Berkley 1990), a nonfiction book on reincarnation, based on a documentary by a Vancouver filmmaker.

Her book "Dance of the Snow Dragon" was published in 1995. "The Snow Queen", her latest book, which was published in 2000, recently won the Aurora award for 2001, the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy award.