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Resources for Kenneth Oppel
Website:
Background information (from author's website):
 Kenneth Oppel was born in 1967 in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of his childhood in Victoria, B.C. and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At around twelve he decided he wanted to be a writer (this came after deciding he wanted to be a scientist, and then an architect). He started out writing sci-fi epics (his Star Wars phase) then went on to swords and sorcery tales (his Dungeons and Dragons phase) and then, during the summer holiday when he was
fourteen, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games (written, of course, during his video game phase). It turned out to be quite a long story, really a short novel, and he rewrote it the next summer. He had a family friend who knew Roald Dahl - one of his favourite authors - and this friend offered to show Dahl his story. He was paralysed with excitement. He never heard back from Roald Dahl directly, but Dahl read his story, and liked it enough to pass on to his own literary agent. Mr. Oppel got a letter from them, saying they wanted to take him on, and try to sell his story. And they did.
Colin's Fantastic Video Adventure was published in 1985, in Britain and Canada and the U.S, and later in France. It was easily the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Kenneth Oppel -- and it gave him the confidence to think he could make writing his career.
Mr. Oppel did his BA at the University of Toronto (a double major in cinema studies and English) and wrote his second children's novel The Live-Forever Machine in his final year, for a creative writing course. He married the year after graduation and spent the next three years in Oxford, where his wife was doing doctoral studies in Shakespeare. Since then they've lived in Newfoundland, Dublin -- and Toronto, where they now live with their three children.
Kenneth Oppel's books include the Silverwing trilogy, which has sold over a million copies around the world, Airborn, winner of the 2004 Governor General's Award for children's literature, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book award from the American Library Association. His latest book is Starclimber, the third in his Airborn series.
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