My love of fantasy stories began as soon as I learned to read and got my first library card. My fondest memories are of sitting for hours in the children's stacks at our local library, pulling book after book off the shelf and opening the pages to worlds of delight and adventure. I took home as many books as I was allowed - in those by-gone days it was only three at a time - and finished them all in a day or two. I brought home all the coloured Fairy Tale books by Andrew Lang, the Narnia series, Mary Poppins, the Borrowers - and found myself in the many worlds of wonder that fantasy brings to us. My reading tastes broadened as I grew older, and as I did my degree in English Literature (with a fair sprinkling of the Russian authors thrown in during my early college years) but I never lost that first love of Faerie, and to this day it remains my favourite genre.
