Sandra Gulland

Sandra Gulland is an acclaimed American-born Canadian historical novelist, editor, and educator whose meticulously researched, narrative-rich epics have sold over one million copies worldwide while permanently reshaping modern literary perspectives on Old World France. Born in Miami, Florida, and raised in Berkeley, California, Gulland pursued her early academic credentials at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Berkeley, before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a minor in mathematics from Roosevelt University in Chicago. She immigrated to Canada in the late 1960s, embarking on a profound civic journey that began by teaching for a year in an Inuit village in Nain, Labrador, before relocating to Toronto to work for a decade as a professional book editor. As a vital institutional builder, she became a founding member of the Editors' Association of Canada. Her career shifted dramatically into full-time fiction writing after relocating her family to a rural log home in Northern Ontario, culminating in her internationally bestselling Josephine B. trilogy—comprising The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B., Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe, and The Last Great Dance on Earth—which utilized a highly immersive fictional diary format to chart the rise of Empress Joséphine Bonaparte. She further extended her dominance in European court portraiture with two critically acclaimed novels set during the reign of Louis XIV, Mistress of the Sun and The Shadow Queen, before successfully pivoting to young-adult crossover fiction with The Game of Hope, an evocative coming-of-age chronicle centered on Joséphine's daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais. Published across seventeen countries and translated into thirteen languages, Gulland's immersive period prose continues to command immense authority. Moving dynamically through 2025 and into 2026, Gulland remains a premier voice in global historical fiction circles, actively split-living between Ontario and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she anchors elite writers' conferences and public panels, while major multinational publishing houses continue to drive comprehensive digital distribution pushes for her definitive Napoleonic and Sun King multi-volume sagas.