It’s the birthday of Gillian Bradshaw (b. 1956), who writes historical fiction set everywhere and everywhen from Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece to Sub-Roman and Roman Britain and who also writes fantasy, science fiction, and children’s lit.

Bradshaw was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Santiago, Chile, and Michigan, where she attended the University of Michigan, winning the Hopwood Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Hawk of May (1980), a fantasy with historical elements. She went on to study Classical Philology at Cambridge, where she continued writing novels and met her future husband. The novel thing worked out, the husband thing worked out, and Bradshaw now has a pant load of published books (something over 30) and half a pant load of children (four).

Bradshaw, whose most recent book is a children’s science fiction novel called Aliens on Holiday (2016), lives in Coventry, England, with her family and their dog.

Due to the vicissitudes and vagaries of orthodontics appointments, deadlines, and urgent grocerial demands reaching beyond the mere familial to the local educational community, today’s post must needs be brief to the point of, you know, brevity. We’ll be back tomorrow in more typically long-winded fashion.

Have a gentle and subdued Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.