Norma Charles (1940 – 2025)
October 01st, 2025
Children’s author, Norma Charles was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba on May 10, 1945 of French and Irish descent. She attended Saskatchewan’s College Mathieu, a convent. As a child she was an avid reader who used to drag her younger brother to the library on Saturdays.
Charles came to British Columbia with her parents at the age of nine. That automobile trip over 75 years ago is the basis for several books including Sophie Sea to Sea (Beach Holme, 2000) that recounts the adventures of Sophie and her four brothers as they accompany their parents by car from Montreal to Maillardville in 1949. The French Canadian family struggles to speak English without a tell-tale accent. Their adventures are told on a province-by-province basis. “There was an influx of Francophones in the 40s and 50s from Quebec,” Charles told BC BookWorld. “My father was one of them.”
Norma Charles answering questions at a book reading.
Charles lived in the Coquitlam enclave of Maillardville for 20 years until she attended UBC and later became a teacher. When her own four children were in school, Charles began to write, inspired by her students and by her “front row seat on the dramas of children’s daily lives.” When she read her first unpublished work aloud to a creative writing class, the instructor commented to the class, “Oh. Is that it?” Undaunted, Charles submitted her manuscript to a publisher. Her “Is that it?” story, See You Later Alligator ((Scholastic, 1976 / 1991), has reportedly sold over 100,000 copies. Charles went on to publish 22 books in total, many of them young adult literature.
She was nominated for a Sheila A. Egoff Award for The Accomplice (Raincoast, 2001) and received the Chocolate Lily Award for All the Way to Mexico (Raincoast, 2003).
Charles remained a dedicated writer until her final days, co-authoring with her daughter Andrea Charles, The One and Only Question (Groundwood, 2025), the story of 9-year old Zeke’s anxiety about starting at a new school where he wonders how he will react if anyone calls him the N-word. It was published a few months before Norma Charles died on August 19, 2025.
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