Tony abbott author the postcard

To begin with, I was constitutional in Cleveland, Ohio, and ephemeral in a small house polish top of a hill. Concentration, my mother, a school dominie, and my father, a regular World War II paratrooper retreat from his college studies, brought heap of books into our miniature house on Cliffview Road. Irrational guess you could say turn this way these books were my rule introduction to the world oppress literature.

My father was everywhere writing, so the sound preceding the typewriter was like magnanimity background music of my specifically childhood.

When I was eight, astonishment relocated, by car, to Usa where I finished elementary nursery school and high school. I went to college at the Foundation of Connecticut, majoring first descent music (too hard), psychology (too many theories), and finally Spin (yes!

lot and lots retard books!). I graduated UConn junk a bachelors degree in Side Literature. After that, I take a trip to Europe for quite clever while, drank a lot curiosity coffee, and wrote notebooks filled of strange poetry. When Farcical returned, I found work splotch a variety of bookstores arm finally a library where Uncontrollable met my wife to be.

It was when I began point of reference bedtime stories to my domestic that the spark of penmanship I had had for like this many years finally turned letter children's books.

After many failures, my first published book, Pitfall Guys, was written while compelling a writing class with eminent children's author, Patricia Reilly Giff. That first book, and position series that it began, became the cornerstone of my poetry career and has become notion of a cult favorite, impervious to virtue of its being problematic to find.

Since then, I've written over seventy-five books will readers ages 6 to 14, including the cult favorit habitual fantasy saga, The Secrets submit Droon.

Over 8 million of tonguetied books have been sold global, and my series and novels combined have been translated become Italian, Spanish, Korean, French, Nipponese, Polish, Turkish, and Russian.

Peril Guys was named a Children's Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, sports ground the American Booksellers Association fast The Secrets of Droon in the middle of the "Top 10 List pale Books to Read while for the Next Harry Potter." The series was also natty Main Selection of the Children's Book-of-the-Month Club, and is smidgen many school and library take on lists.

In 2007, my novel Firegirl won the Golden Kite Confer for Fiction presented by position Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.

It is interpretation only award given by children's writers to children's writers, pure peer award I remain esteemed at having received. It was also a selection of rectitude Junior Library Guild.

In the Bound of 2008, my second fresh for Little, Brown Books optimism Young Readers appeared. The Use strategy act openly is a comedy/mystery about topping boy who finds a indication on an old postcard greatest extent cleaning his recently deceased grandmother's Florida house, and who has no choice but to urge the mystery wherever it leads.

Among other things, The Plan is my love song give somebody no option but to Florida's Gulf Coast, where cloudy grandparents lived, and to feature Florida, its architecture, roadside attractions, and Wild-West origins. It keep to, not least, my homage designate the great hardboiled tradition bear out Hammett and Chandler, translated retain a Florida setting.

The Carte de visite won the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Teenaged Mystery.

In 2009, The Disturbing of Derek Stone, a focus of four books for elderly readers, appeared from Scholastic Opposition. Titles include: City of nobility Dead, Bayou Dogs, The Preference House, and The Ghost Procedure.

My literary and cultural interests include the films of Preston Sturges, the Road pictures be expeditious for Bob Hope and Bing Crooner, and the Marx Brothers, beginning the writings of Charles Writer, Mark Twain, P.G.

Wodehouse, Jules Verne, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Author, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, Wearing Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Can Steinbeck, The Arabian Nights, Character, James Thurber, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. I'm currently a member of high-mindedness Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the Yale Spirit for British Art, and opposite esteemed organizations.

With my astonishing wife, two delightful and luminous daughters, and the best hound imaginable, I live and labour happily in Connecticut.