Erin Bow

Erin Bow studied particle physics, spent a summer at CERN and was some way into doctoral research before she left science for poetry, which she still publishes under her maiden name, Erin Noteboom. Raised in Omaha, she moved to Canada in 1997 and settled in Kitchener, Ontario, where she is married to the novelist James Bow. Her middle-grade novel Simon Sort of Says was given a Newbery Honor in 2024. Plain Kate, from 2010, was her first for young readers, issued in Britain as Wood Angel: a wood carver's daughter, distrusted as a witch by a town going hungry, sells her shadow to a real one named Linay in return for the means to run and for her heart's wish, which gives her cat Taggle the power of speech. It took the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award in 2011. The Scorpion Rules, five years later, opens a science fiction pair set under an artificial intelligence that keeps nations from war by holding their rulers' children hostage.