Andrew Pyper (born March 29, 1968) is an award-winning Canadian author. Early life: childhood and education Pyper's parents emigrated from Northern Ireland to Stratford, Ontario. His father was an ophthalmologist, his mother trained as a nurse. Pyper was the youngest of five children. As a child, he read a lot of books and aspired to be a writer. "I was a de facto only child, because there were eight years between me and the next brother. Like a lot of only children, I turned to the nerdier pursuits of books and writing and ... making things up." He studied at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and obtained an honours B.A. and M.A. in English Literature. Rather than pursue a doctorate, Pyper followed a girlfriend to Toronto and studied law at the University of Toronto (U. of T.). Although that relationship ended, Pyper continued three years of legal studies and graduated with a law degree (LL.B) and earned a Legal Theory Award. After articling for a year he was called to the bar in 1996. He has never practised law. "I knew very early on that I wasn't going to be a lawyer, but I was brought up to believe, wrongly I think, that once you start something you never quit — real Presbyterian stick-to-it-iveness." While he was at the U. of T. he had several short stories published in Canadian literary magazines including Quarry and The New Quarterly. "It was a classic writerly compromise, I thought I'll get a job and hopefully make enough moneyworking part-time to feed the writing. What I didn't anticipate was how much I'd hate the law." Before he had finished his articling year Pyper decided to pursue a career as a fiction writer. Career Pyper had set himself the goal of having a book published before he turned thirty. Unbeknownst to Pyper, his editor at Quarry, Steven Heighton, sent a number of his short stories to John Metcalf, an editor at the Canadian publisher The Porcupine's Quill. To Pyper's delight, Metcalf published them in a volume entitled Kiss Me, released in October 1996. Pyper then obtained a writer-in-residence position at Trent University's Champlain College. While there he wrote his first novel, Lost Girls. It was published in Canada by HarperCollins in 1999 and became a Canadian bestseller. It was published by Delacourt in the U.S. and MacMillan in the U.K. in 2000. It was in