A Recipe for Bees

Alan Bradley was born in Toronto, Ont. and grew up in the pleasant lakeside town of Cobourg, Ont. After a long career in television broadcasting, he took early retirement from the University of Saskatchewan to write fulltime. He has published many children’s stories as well as lifestyle and arts columns in Canadian newspapers. His adult stories have been broadcast on CBC radio and published in various literary journals. He has also written several screenplays and taught university-level courses in screenwriting. He was the recipient of the first Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for Children’s Literature. After writing for several years on the Maltese island of Gozo, Alan Bradley now lives in the Isle of Man.

The first book of his Flavia de Luce series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie won the 2007 Debut Dagger Award of the Crime Writers Association in the UK; the 2009 Agatha Award for Best First Novel; the 2010 Dilys, awarded by the International Mystery Booksellers Association; the 2010 Macavity Award for the Best First Mystery Novel, given by Mystery Readers International; the Spotted Owl Award, given by the Friends of Mystery, and the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award, given by the Crime Writers of Canada for Best First Novel. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie has also been nominated for an Anthony Award, and the Barry Award. Besides appearing on the New York Times bestsellers list as a Favorite Mystery of 2009, Sweetness was also, among other honours, an American Library Association nominee as Best Book for Young Adults, a Barnes and Noble Bestseller, and was named to the 2009 Bloomer List.

All eight of the Flavia de Luce books published to date have been New York Times bestsellers, and are presently published in thirty-nine countries and thirty-six languages.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz has been published worldwide in English and in many
other languages in more than fifteen territories. Her latest book, The Spawning
Grounds, is her first literary novel since the 2007 bestseller Turtle Valley.

Her first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, met with terrific acclaim and
was a finalist for the prestigious Giller Prize. This international bestseller also won
the UK’s Betty Trask Award, the BC Book Prize for Fiction and the VanCity Book
Prize, and was a finalist for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award.

Gail’s second novel, A Recipe for Bees, was again a finalist for the Giller Prize
and was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A Rhinestone Button
was also a bestseller and Gail’s first book, The Miss Hereford Stories,
was a finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour.

Anderson-Dargatz’s fictional style has been called “Margaret Laurence meets
Gabriel García Márquez” because her writing tends towards magic realism,
but she says the magic in her writing arises not from literary influences, but from
family stories of the Thompson Shuswap region, which she carefully transcribed.
“My father passed on the rich stories about the region I grew up in, which he
heard from the Shuswap men he worked with. And my mother told me tales of
ghosts, eccentrics and dark deeds that haunted the area.”