“I’ve been fascinated by the paranormal since I was a child,” Kelley Armstrong confesses. “I blame it on too many Saturday mornings watching Scooby-Doo.”

From this passion for the paranormal and for animals, Kelley has created a genre of her own. “This is not
The Call of the Wild,” a The Walrus reviewer quips. “It’s Nora Roberts meets The Sopranos by way of Henry David Thoreau. Armstrong’s overarching thesis is the age-old notion that, behind our codes of etiquette… we’re all animals.”

Kelley’s contemporary fantasy novels have topped the New York Times bestseller list and are published in more than twenty countries. In 2011, her novel The Summoning won the B.C. Teen Readers’ Choice Award. Her popularity continues to grow as teens and adults discover her books, which combine the appeal of a thriller/romance with larger themes that speak to all readers.

Kelley’s most recent work, Thirteen, continues the enormously popular Otherworld series, which features a tantalizing cast of werewolves, rogue witches, sorcerers, half-demons, and necromancers in more than a dozen novels. She has also published two novels in the Nadia Stafford mystery series.

In 2008, Kelley turned to writing Young Adult fiction, publishing three novels in her Darkest Powers YA urban fantasy trilogy. Last year, she began the Darkness
Rising trilogy with The Gathering, which has been shortlisted for the CLA Young Adult Book Award. The series continues this year with The Calling, which recounts the exploits of sixteen-year-old Maya, whose paw-print birthmark gives her an intense and surprising connection to the animals that roam the Vancouver Island wilderness.

Born in Sudbury, Kelley studied psychology at the University of Western Ontario and afterwards trained as a computer programmer. Following the sudden and overwhelming success of her first book, Bitten, in 2001, she became a full-time fantasy writer. She lives with her husband, kids, and “far too many” pets in Aylmer, Ontario, where she continues to turn out bestsellers while safely locked away in her basement dungeon…er, office.

Website: www.kelleyarmstrong.com