Shelly Sanders

Shelly Sanders is a historical fiction novelist who has her feet planted in both the United States and Canada. The reason for this is that she was brought up in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, even though she was born in Toronto, Ontario. She had just started high school when she returned to Canada and had a very difficult transition. While growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, a few hours from the border with Wisconsin, she had read and been fascinated by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Little House on the Prairie books. It was from these novels, which were set in early 1800s Wisconsin, that she was introduced to historical fiction. The author’s insightful yet simple words offered her a very vivid sense of life in the American Midwest. The people who lived in these books were comfortable and cosy in their little log houses with snow drifts all around, and the wind cried as it could not get in to warm itself by the fire. Sanders would graduate with an English literature degree from the University of Waterloo before attending Toronto Metropolitan University, where she studied journalism.