Charis Cotter

Readings

Charis starts with a lively discussion of what students think it would be like to be a king or a queen, including the palace, the clothes, the servants, the food. Then she gives examples from Kids Who Rule of what it was really like for five child rulers. From King Tut’s 145 pairs of underwear to the Dalai Lama’s mice, she provides fascinating and fun details of royal life as well as a sobering view of the hardships the young kings and queens had to endure. She gives a reading from the book and provides a brief account of the research and writing process that produced the book, including the story of how she talked to a real princess.

Book Sales:

Copies of books can be brought to be sold and autographed.

Biography

When Charis was a child growing up in downtown Toronto, she wanted to work in a library because she thought that would be a job where she could sit around reading books all day. The Parliament Street library was her favourite place, not only because of all the wonderful books, but because the librarian organized plays for the local children to act in. Charis loved acting almost as much as reading, and soon was writing her own plays and producing them at camp and at school.

After university, where she studied English (and read a lot more books), Charis trained as an actor in Toronto and England. Her favourite role was playing a murderer on a transcontinental mystery train with Dick Francis. To earn a living in between acting jobs, Charis worked in a variety of places including a bookstore, a film company, a vegetarian restaurant, a flea market and a kindergarten. In her most ladylike job she wrote invitations by hand for the Ontario Lieutenant Governor’s office.

When Charis had her daughter, Zoe, she changed careers and started doing freelance editing and writing. This gave her the opportunity to read lots more books on fascinating subjects: astronomy, canoes, gardening, cooking, human evolution and Toronto’s history. She soon found herself writing about history and she got hooked on the past. She wrote a book about Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s, illustrated with photographs from that time. Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919–1939 won the Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence in 2005.

Charis and Zoe both love reading about kings and queens, and that’s how Charis came up with the idea for Kids Who Rule: The Remarkable Lives of Five Child Monarchs. It tells the stories of five young kings and queens by blending history, biography and fiction. She followed that with another book about exceptional children: Wonder Kids: The Remarkable Lives of Nine Child Prodigies, which will be published in spring, 2008.
Charis divides her time between Toronto and a small cottage in Newfoundland.