A classical version of my biography would go something like this:

Richard Scrimger was born in the city of M--- in the province of Q---, the son of a product manager. His father, that is, Richard's grandfather, was an accountant. All the Scrimger men had brown hair; Richard's grandfather also had a little moustache. Richard's mother was artistic: how vividly he remembers her leaning against the piano in their drawing room, elegance personified, before gliding into exquisite motion on his father's arm. No, come to think of it, that was Ginger Rogers.

In a more modern vein, faintly deconstructed:

I was born with very little hair and very little feet and hands. They all grew together and I still have them, together with all my organs except tonsils. I did well in school, and stopped going. I made no progress in my writing, and kept at it. There's a lesson here, but I don't know for whom. I can't believe how long I was married; it seemed like only a few minutes. And yet there are the children. I have four of them -- actually, they have me and we all know it. The motto of South Carolina is Dum spiro spero. My blood type is A Negative. I've never bought anything from the Home Shopping Network, which I think of as A Positive. Beets can be peeled easily if you first place them in a pot of boiling water for five minutes. How much more do you need to know about anybody?

I have been writing novels for adults and children since 1996. No, that's not true. I wrote for years before that, but no one cared. Since 1996 I've published thirteen books for adults and children. Some have done very well. A few came close. A couple didn't do well at all. My most recent offerings are Mystical Rose (adults) and From Charlie's Point of View (kids). I am at work on two more individual books right now, and a series.

In 1996 I published my first novel, Crosstown (Toronto: The Riverbank Press), which was short-listed for the 1997 City of Toronto Book Award.

Humorous short pieces about my life as an at-home dad with four small children used to appear regularly in the Globe & Mail and Chatelaine, and can still be found fairly regularly on the back page of Today's Parent. I reworked some of this material into a full-length chunk of not-quite-non-fiction, which was published by HarperCollins in 1997 as Still Life With Children.

And I write children's fiction. Two middle-school novels, The Nose From Jupiter and The Way To Schenectady (both Toronto: Tundra Books, 1998), did well enough to require sequels. There are four Norbert books so far, and two Peelers.

My work has received a lot of attention in Canada and The United States. The Nose From Jupiter is a Canadian bestseller. At one point, it and its first sequel were right after Harry Potter on the charts. It won a Mr Christie Book Award, and was on most of the top ten lists. In America it was on the Kids' Pick and YALSA lists, and was nominated for a Pacific North West Award. It has been translated into a Scottish dozen languages (that’s less than 12). The other novels have, among them, made six or seven short-lists in Canada. A Nose For Adventure also made the American Kids' Pick list. Bun Bun's Birthday was listed as one of the five best children's books of 2001 by Quill and Quire. Mystical Rose (Toronto: Doubleday, 2000), my second adult novel, was selected as a Globe and Mail notable book of the year. My latest offering, From Charlie's Point Of View, features a blind protagonist, and is listed as among the “best of the best” of 2005 at the Chicago public library. I am currently finishing a suburban rafting adventure called Into The Ravine. As always, it is my current favorite among my books. After that I plan to write something funny about death.