Shelley Tanaka is a Canadian editor of numerous award-winning young adult novels, an award-winning author of nonfiction for children, a translator and writing teacher.
Shelley Tanaka was born in Toronto, Canada. She received an Honours Bachelor's degree in English and German from Queen's University, and a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She lives in Ontario, Canada.
Tanaka began her editing career at Clarke Irwin. She has been the fiction editor at Groundwood Books, a Canadian children’s book publisher, since 1983 and has edited books by many Canadian writers, including Tim Wynne-Jones, Deborah Ellis, Martha Brooks, Sarah Ellis and Alan Cumyn. She is the editor of thirteen Governor General’s Award winning books.
Shelley Tanaka writes nonfiction for children, including books in the I Was There series and A Day That Changed America series. She has won numerous awards for her writing, among them the Orbis Pictus Award in 2009.Her books have been translated into several languages: German, Danish, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Thai. Additionally, she has translated many children’s picture books and novels from German and French into English.
Tanaka teaches in the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
