Canadian author Eileen Kernaghan was born in Enderby, British Columbia, in 1939, daughter of William Alfred and Belinda Maude Monk. The author grew up on a dairy farm near Grindrod, a small village of 600 residents at the north end of the Okanagan Valley. After finishing elementary school in Grindrod, young Eileen went to high school in Enderby, a town big enough to have a hospital but small enough that (a few years later) even the Mayor's dog was called "Sir."

Young Eileen started writing about the same time that she learned to read, at age five. When she was very young, she loved to read the exotic adventures in antique lands of A. A. Merritt, Clark Ashton Smith, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. "I read whatever I could find on my parents' shelves," Kernaghan said in an interview for a future issue of Canadian Children's Literature...