Celebrating Seniors - Pauline Gedge Turns 70

Baby boomer and Canadian historical, fantasy, sci-fi and horror fiction author Pauline Gedge was born December 11, 1945 in Auckland, New Zealand.

On her website paulinegedge.com, Pauline Gedge recounts a tangled history of moving back and forth between cities and even continents, starting when Pauline was just 6 years old when the Gedge family moved to England. They moved again, this time to Canada, in 1959, only to move back to New Zealand in 1961 when Pauline’s sister Anne was dying.

Pauline got a job teaching in New Zealand, but wasn’t an inspired teacher….she just wanted to write. She got married in 1966 to Richard Harrison, a fellow teacher’s college student, and she, Harrison and her family moved back to Canada that year. Her oldest son Simon was born in England in 1968; by the time her second son Roger came along in 1970, they were once again living in Edmonton, Alberta. The couple divorced in 1971 and Pauline moved to the town of Edgerton, Alberta, just east of Edmonton.

Pauline Gedge had started off as a poet and went unpublished for years before switching to writing novels. Gedge told author Douglas Gibson (Across Canada by Story: A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure) that in 1975, now a single mother living on welfare with two sons, she was hit with inspiration one morning. Pauline wrote her third attempt at a novel, Child of the Morning, in just 6 weeks. Child of the Morning was her third entry in the Alberta Search-for-a-New-Novelist Competition and was a success; the book was published the next year.

She has gone on to write 13 novels, most recently her first published book as a senior citizen – The King’s Man (2011) – another historical fiction novel set in Egypt in the time of Pharaoh Amunhotep the Third. Pauline Gedge’s books have been translated into 18 languages and have sold upwards of 6 million copies internationally.

Pauline Gedge met her second husband Bernie Ramanauskas in the late 1980’s. They married in 1990 and moved back to Edgerton, where she still lives today. Ramanauskas often did the intensive research required for her novels; although the couple divorced in 2006, he had already completed the research for her subsequent books The Twice Born (2007) and The King’s Man. Now a septuagenarian senior citizen, Gedge has said her next book (ETA is still tbd) will be historical, but a departure from her familiar Egyptian locale.