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My name is Beryl Young and I have the best job in the world because
I write books for children.
I was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan on a
cold and snowy November night.
Because my father was in the
RCMP, our family moved often and I have lived in almost every province
in Canada.
Here is a picture of my Grade Four class
in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. I'm
the one with braids and the big bows in the second row, third
from the right
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Here I am at age 3. You can see
that my mother liked big bows!
By the time I graduated from grade twelve in Victoria, BC, I had
attended sixteen schools and NEVER wore bows!
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I married in Oxford, England and raised three children in Canada.
When my children were young I wrote poems and articles for magazines,
as well as talks for radio and television. I also produced three
music cassettes of Lullabies with the Lullaby Lady to encourage
parents to sing to their babies. (see Other
Work)
I was a grandmother before I wrote my first
book for children which was about my youngest son's family who invited
a ten-year-old girl from Belarus for a health respite visit. That
book is called Wishing Star Summer and you can read
about it along with my other books in Books.
I was enormously proud of my RCMP father,
but I never thought I would one day write his life story. In
Charlie: a Home Child's Life in Canada I tell the true
story of how my dad was sent to Canada from England when he was
just thirteen.
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One of the wonderful things about being a
writer is that you can write about your passions and one of the
passions of my life has been India. When I was nine years old, I
began to write to a pen pal in India, a girl called Shanti. Sadly,
we lost touch with each other as adults, but with Follow the
Elephant I've written a book about a thirteen-year-old boy
taken by his grandmother to find her lost pen pal in India. Another
wonderful thing about being a writer is you can re-write history.
I guess that means Ben will find Shanti in the book, but you'll
have to read it to find out just how he does it.
India is still my passion, and I've travelled
to that vast country three times to visit my foster family there.
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Rather tentatively meeting my first elephant
in India
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 I've
also written two chapter books called The Game and
The Magic Music Box that are being used to teach English
to Korean students.
I love the sun and have travelled to Mexico
for twenty-five years. For more sun I try to visit Saskatchewan
every summer to touch my prairie roots.
I now live near the sea in Vancouver, B.C.
My three children are grown and I have four grandchildren aged 27,
23, 10 and 7. Visiting with them, reading and writing and walking
are what I love to do every day.
Now that I think
about it I realize there's a grandmother in every one of my books.
I wonder why?
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