Alan Bradley was born in Toronto and grew up in Cobourg, Ontario. Upon retirement, Bradley began writing full time. In July of 2007, Bradley won the Debut Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers’ Association for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009), based on a sample that would become the first novel in a series featuring eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce. The Dagger award brought international attention to Bradley’s fiction debut, and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and the additional novels planned for the series will be published in twenty-eight languages and in more than thirty countries. Bradley lives in Malta with his wife Shirley and two calculating cats.