Alan Bradley was born in Toronto and grew up in Cobourg, Ontario. Bradley has an education in electronic engineering, and worked at numerous radio and television stations in Ontario and at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in Toronto. Later, he became the Director of Television Engineering in the media centre at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, SK, where he remained for 25 years before taking early retirement to write in 1994. Bradley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Flavia de Luce Mystery series. In 2009 he won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie). Bradley has also written non-fiction books, The… Shoebox Bible and Ms. Holmes of Baker Street.