Bio
Gillian Chan was born in England in 1954. The daughter of a serving RAF officer, she got used to moving every two years as her father was posted to new stations in England and Europe. This made for an interesting childhood, and led to her becoming a good observer, a characteristic which is useful for a writer.
Before she trained as an English and Drama teacher, she had many different jobs, including bank clerk, shop assistant, mail sorter, dish washer and bar tender. She came to Canada in 1990, settling in Dundas, Ontario, where she still lives with her husband, and her son.
Her two collections of short stories for young adults, "Golden Girl" and "Glory Days", draw upon her experiences as a teacher. She made the switch from writing short stories to novels in 2001 and her first novel, "The Carved Box" (Kids Can Press 2001), is an historical fantasy in which myth, folklore and fact mingle. Two other historical novels followed, "A Foreign Field" (Kids Can Press 2002) and "Dear Canada: An Ocean Apart - the Gold Mountain Diary of Chin Mei-ling" (Scholastic 2004). "The Turning" (Kids Can Press 2005) is a fantasy about a Canadian boy who becomes embroiled in a war between supernatural factions in Britain. Gillian's love of history has contributed to "I am Canada: A Call to Battle" (Scholastic 2012), the story of a farmer's son who runs away to fight alongside his father and brother at the Battle of Lundy's Lane in 1814. Family history inspired another book in Scholastic's I Am Canada series in "Defend or Die" which follows a young Canadian solider during the fall of Hong Kong in 1941 and his subsequent imprisonment by the Japanese. "The Disappearance" is gritty mystery tinged with the supernatural.
