Charis Cotter
www.chariscotter.com.www.chariscotter.wordpress.com. Charis Cotter is a writer and freelance editor living in Western Bay, Newfoundland. She was born in Toronto, Ontario and grew up there. After doing a degree in English at Glendon College, York University, she studied to be an actor in Toronto and London, England. She worked in theatre in Toronto for a few years: her favourite role was as the killer on murder-mystery train that went across Canada. To earn a living in between acting jobs, Charis worked in a variety of places including a bookstore, a film company, a vegetarian restaurant, a flea market and a kindergarten. In her most ladylike job she wrote invitations by hand for the Ontario Lieutenant Governor's office. In the early 1990s she started working as a freelance editor and writer. She worked on a variety of books about architecture, canoes, gardening, cooking, astronomy, human evolution and history. Then she wrote a book about Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s, illustrated with photographs from that time. Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919 - 1939 won the Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence in 2005. Charis turned to writing children's books and wrote a biography series for Annick Press about children with unusual childhoods: kings and queens, child prodigies, and children's authors. She indulged a lifelong fascination with ghosts and wrote an illustrated book about international ghosts. Her books were nominated for several awards and Charis started touring schools with presentations about her books, reviving her acting skills to engage the students' attention. She becomes Queen Elizabeth II to discuss child monarchs and the Scottish Silky ghost to introduce students to ghosts from around the world. She has visited schools and libraries across Canada, from St. John's to Victoria, B.C. Every fall she does a "ghost tour" of schools on the Avalon with the Scottish Silky ghost and enjoys scaring kids with true Newfoundland ghost stories. Charis has been coming to Newfoundland since the early 1980s and bought a house here in 2007. She is currently working on a children's novel set in Newfoundland and doing freelance editing for publishers in Newfoundland and elsewhere. She recently worked on Death of a Lesser Man, by Thomas Rendell Curran (Boulder), a murder mystery set in St. John's in the 1940s. PublicationsBorn to Write: The Remarkable Lives of Six Famous Authors. Annick Press, 2009A World Full of Ghosts. Art by Marc Mongeau. Annick Press, 2009 Wonder Kids: The Remarkable Lives of Nine Child Prodigies. Annick Press, 2008 Kids Who Rule: The Remarkable Lives of Five Child Monarchs. Annick Press, 2007 Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919 - 1939. Firefly Books, 2004 |