Born in Miami, Florida in 1944, Sandra Gulland lived in Rio de Janeiro, Berkeley and Chicago before immigrating to Canada in 1970 to teach in an Inuit village in northern Labrador for one year. Settling in Toronto, she worked as a book editor for a decade before moving with her husband and two children to a log house in northern Ontario. Juggling children, a dog, three cats, pigs, chickens and a succession of horses, she worked as a freelance editor for five years before committing to writing full-time in 1985.Five years later, she began writing the Josephine B. Trilogy, novels based on the life of Josephine Bonaparte. The trilogy has now been published in seventeen countries.In 2008 Sandra published Mistress of the Sun, a novel set in the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, which was on the Maclean's bestseller list for over one month in hardcover. Published in paperback in the spring of 2009, it made the Globe & Mail Canadian bestseller list. It is published in both Canada and the U.S. as well as in several translated editions, including French and German.In 2014, her fifth historical novel, The Shadow Queen, was published by HarperCollins in Canada, and Doubleday in the US. Also set in the Court of the Sun King and comprising many of the same characters as Mistress of the Sun, the two novel comprise The Sun Court Duet. 
In 2018, The Game of Hope, a YA about Josephine Bonaparte's daughter and Napoleon's stepdaughter was published by Penguin Teen in both Canada and the US. In addition to maintaining a website, she writes two blogs: Notes on the Writing Life, and Baroque Expolrations, on her historical research. She also has a page on Facebook, and is a regular poster to Twitter, Tumblr and other Social Media sites.Sandra and her husband divide the year between northern Ontario, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
She is now writing a second YA, this one about a girl falconer in Elizabethan England.