AnnickPress

K.V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, where her father was a biology professor at Queen's University. She grew up in the nearby village of Westbrook. She has also lived in St. Andrew's, New Brunswick; West Berlin, Germany; and Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. Her favorite things to do when she was a kid were to read and to go exploring in the pastures and woods with her dog. She really enjoyed drawing, too.

K.V.'s absolutely favorite book as a child is still her favorite: The Lord of the Rings. Her original copy fell apart by the time she was nine. She is one of those people who goes back to read it again every year. Other than Tolkien, favorite childhood authors included A.A. Milne, John Buchan, Arthur Ransome, Rosemary Sutcliff, C.S. Lewis, Alan Garner, and Mary Stewart (her Merlin books).

Before she ever started writing them down, she would tell stories to her younger siblings. At around the age of 11, she wrote a novel called The Adventures of Princess Eleanor for a contest. (It didn't win.) When she was in high school, she used to enter fantasy short stories in adult literary contests. (For some reason, they never won either.)

K.V. says that the reason she writes is that she loves language and stories. Her prose style is influenced mostly by the authors she read and reread as a child and continues to go back to today, as well as by authors she discovered as a teen whose literary style really resonates with her--people such as C.J. Cherry and Robin McKinley. She likes to write stories she'd want to read herself, stories about people, not necessarily human, who are on the edge of things, and about worlds with lots of shadow and mystery.

Torrie and the Pirate Queen (2005) has its roots in stories Johansen used to tell to one of her sisters about Anna, the 12-year-old pirate. She eventually got so tired of the character that she announced Anna had fallen off the mast, had broken her leg, and was in bed with a cast. And there she stayed for 20 years or so. Anna, the main character in the novel, is not a pirate herself anymore, and she's a bit older than 12, but still, she must be glad to finally have that cast off her leg.

Torrie and the Pirate Queen received the 2006 Lilla Sterling Award from the Canadian Authors' Association and was nominated for the 2006 Silver Birch Award and the 2006 Diamond Willow Award. Her adult non-fiction book on the history of children's fantasy literature, Quests and Kingdoms: A Grown-Up's Guide to Children's Fantasy, was nominated for the 2006 Harvey Darton Award in the U.K. In Torrie and the Firebird (2006), Torrie the Old Thing returns to join spunky captain Anna on an adventurous quest to recover a stolen gem and prove a young boy's innocence. The newest book in the Torrie Quests series is Torrie and the Snake-Prince (2007), a magical adventure of action and irresistible humor.

K.V. believes that the most important thing you can do when you're young, if you're keen on writing, is to read a lot, and keep writing and improving. Read lots of good authors from the past, not just the most popular recent books. Read lots of non-fiction too--history, for example; it will expand your understanding of the world.

K.V. lives in Sackville, New Brunswick. She has a dog, Pippin, and lots of goldfish. She grows a lot of exotic trees indoors, some of which were mentioned in Torrie and the Pirate Queen and Torrie and the Firebird. Most of them are too undisciplined to be called bonsai. Bunya trees sound too fantastic to be real, but they are--she has three of them!