Alan Bradley (writer)

Alan Bradley
Born	1938 (age 78–79) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1994–present
Genre	Mystery
Notable works	Flavia de Luce mystery series (including The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)

Alan Bradley (born 1938) is a Canadian mystery writer known for his Flavia de Luce series, which began with the acclaimed The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

Bradley was born in 1938 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was brought up with two older sisters roughly 100 kilometers east of Toronto in the small town of Cobourg, Ontario. His mother raised the children alone after Bradley's father left the family when he was a toddler. Bradley learned to read at an early age, partly because he was a sickly child who spent a lot of time in bed. However, Bradley confesses to having been a "very bad student", particularly in high school, spending his free time reading in the local cemetery because he felt he didn't fit in.

After completing his education, Bradley worked in Cobourg as a radio and television engineer, designing and building electronic systems. He then worked briefly for Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto (now Ryerson University), before moving to Saskatoon to take a job at the University of Saskatchewan in 1969. There he helped develop a broadcasting studio, where he worked as Director of Television Engineering for 25 years. He took an early retirement from the university in 1994 in order to become a full-time writer.

Bradley had been interested in writing his entire life. However, he began to take it more seriously in his early 30s after moving to Saskatoon. There, he joined several writing groups and began spending time with local writers.

He wrote several short stories that were read on CBC Radio and published in literary magazines. Following his early retirement from the University of Saskatchewan in 1994, Bradley and his wife Shirley moved to Kelowna, British Columbia for her work, while Bradley focused full-time on writing. He wrote multiple screenplays over the course of nine years. Then, during the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park Fire, many homes neighboring Bradley's were destroyed, although his was spared from the fire. The experience inspired him to do something different, and he began focusing on memoirs instead of screenplays. He wrote a non-fiction book called Ms Holmes of Baker Street and a memoir called The Shoebox Bible. In 2006, he began writing his first novel.

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