Kenneth Oppel

Kenneth Oppel (born 1967) is a Canadian author of fiction for children and young adults. Raised in Port Alberni, British Columbia, he sold his first book, a work of comic fantasy, while still a teenager and later studied cinema and English at the University of Toronto, working briefly as an editor before writing full-time. He is best known for the Silverwing saga, following anthropomorphic bats through a mythic natural world, and for the steampunk Airborn trilogy, centered on cabin boy Matt Cruse aboard a fantastical airship; Airborn won Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for children's literature and a Michael L. Printz Honor. Oppel later wrote The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, imagining Mary Shelley's scientist as a boy, and the eco-horror duology Thrive and Ghostlight. His books have won the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Award six times.