BIO
Long before C. K. was an author she was a fan of books about Winnie the Pooh, Babar, Madeline, Anne Shirley and anything by Judy Blume. Throughout high school her favourite class was English. No surprise, then, that most of her time spent at York University in Toronto was as an English major—not the traditional way to graduate with a B.A. (Hons) in film studies but a fine way to get a general arts education.
After getting her film studies degree C. K. headed for Dublin, Ireland and spent the majority of the nineties there in forgettable jobs meeting unforgettable people and enjoying the buzz. She always believed she'd get around to writing in earnest eventually, and she began writing her first novel in a flat in Dublin and finished it in a Toronto suburb. By then she'd discovered that fiction about young people felt the freshest and most exciting to her. You have most of your life to be an adult but you only grow up once!
As a writer, C. K. is naturally crazy about good books. Her recommended reading list is available on her website, along with other assorted favourites. An avid interest in website design prompted C. K. to design her first writer's site, The Start of Something.com, which was named one of the top ten in Writer's Digest 2001 Best Web Site Competition. The C. K. Kelly Martin website is now her main site and is a modified version of a Blogger template by VeeThemes. There you can find all sorts of information regarding her other books.
Currently residing near Toronto with her Dub husband, C. K. is an aunt to twenty-one nieces and nephews, and a great-aunt to four great-nieces and two great-nephews. She became an Irish citizen in 2001
and continues to visit Dublin as often as she can while working on novels about
young people.Just Like You Said It Would Be is the book of her heart, but C.K.'s first young adult book, I Know It's Over, came out with Random House in September 2008, and was followed by One Lonely Degree, The Lighter Side of Life and Death, My Beating Teenage Heart and sci-fi thriller Yesterday. She released Yesterday's sequel, Tomorrow, in 2013 and put out her first adult novel, Come See About Me, in June 2012. Two of her recent contemporary YA books, The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing and Delicate, were published by Cormorant Books' Dancing Cat Books imprint in 2014 and 2015. They also published her middle grade debut, Stricken, in November 2017.
In 2019 C. K. made her horror debut with DCB under the name Cara Martin. Booklist described Shantallow as "serious, literary and very scary" and Kirkus called it "gut-wrenching on various levels."
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