Writer, columnist, and librarian Sarah Ellis has become one of the best-known authors for young adults in her native Canada with titles such as The Baby Project, Pick-Up Sticks, and Back of Beyond: Stories of the Supernatural. In addition to young adult novels, Ellis has also written for younger children and has authored several books about the craft of writing. Praised by Booklist contributor Hazel Rochman as “one of the best children’s literature critics,” Ellis “writes without condescension or pedantry. . . . Her prose is a delight: plain, witty, practical, wise.”
Ellis was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1952, the youngest of three children in her family. As she once noted, “[My] joy in embroidering the truth probably comes from my own childhood. My father was a rich mine of anecdotes and jokes. He knew more variations on the ‘once there were three men in a rowboat’ joke than anyone I’ve encountered since.
Books in order of publication:
Novels
Out of the Blue
Pick Up Sticks
Next Door Neighbours
Baby Project
Odd Man Out
Outside In
Picture books
Big Ben
Next Stop
Salmon Forest
Ben Over Night
Queen’s Feet
Putting Up With Mitchell
Short story collections
Back of Beyond
A Season for Miracles
A Christmas to Remember
The Tunnel
Gore
Knife
Dear Canada Diary books
A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall
Days of Toil and Tears: The Child Labour Diary of Flora Rutherford
That Fatal Night: The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton
Chapter books
The Several Lives of Orphan Jack
Books about writing
From Reader to Writer
The Young Writer’s Companion
Anthologies edited
Girls’ Own
Oak Lawn Library Friends 