Deborah Ellis

Born in Cochrane, Ontario, Deborah Ellis decided at age 11 that she wanted to write. She moved to Toronto at age 17 to work as an activist advocating for nonviolence. Ellis’s first novel, Looking for X, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for children’s literature in 2000. However, Ellis is best known for the Breadwinner series. In 1997, she traveled to Pakistan to interview Afghan women in refugee camps. Though she had a different book in mind when she went, an interview with a woman whose daughter dressed as a boy so she could feed the family caught her attention and resulted in The Breadwinner. Since then, Ellis has traveled to Africa, South America, and throughout the Middle East to interview women and children for her novels and nonfiction works. All the royalties she receives from her books go to organizations like Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and UNICEF.