Heather Vogel Frederick

Heather Vogel Frederick is an American author of historical fiction, fantasy, and contemporary fiction for children. She was born into a family that loved books and was a voracious reader right from the time she could read. Vogel Frederick’s father was a principal and elementary school teacher that read to her and her two younger sisters every night before they went to bed. She was fortunate to be born in a family of talented storytellers. Vogel would hide behind sofas and chairs, eavesdropping on her aunts, grandmother, and mother telling stories. Of particular interest to her were the stories about growing up in rural Nova Scotia, that she begged her grandmother to tell over and over again. She knew she wanted to be a writer by the time she was six and started writing short stories two years later, including a whole novel that she wrote during summer camp. When Frederick was eleven, Her family moved to England and took up residence in a 400-year-old cottage near the Charnwood Forest. The old house provided the perfect backdrop to her storytelling mind, and she spent most of her days at her bedroom’s windowsill writing about doomed teenage queen, knights in shining armor, and castles. She would continue to write stories as a hobby through middle school and high school, but it was in college that she knew she wanted to write children’s books. During her college years majoring in German and English Literature, she met an instructor passionate in children’s books that reintroduced her to the genre and got her writing again.