Shelley Wood is a novelist, medical journalist, and editor. Her second novel, The Leap Year Gene will be published in August 2024 by HarperCollins Canada, and as The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley in the United States, by Union Square Press. Her debut novel, The Quintland Sisters (William Morrow|HarperCollins|Harper360), was an instant #1 Globe & Mail and Toronto Star bestseller and one of the top 10 bestselling Canadian fiction books of 2019. Her short fiction, creative non-fiction, columns, and travel-writing have been published in a range of literary journals, magazines, and newspapers internationally and have won a range of Canadian and US prizes.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Shelley has lived in Montreal, Cape Town, and the Middle East. She studied English Literature at McGill University and did a graduate degree in journalism at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. She works full-time as the Editorial Director for the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) based in New York, NY, also serving as the Managing Editor for CRF’s cardiology news website. Before that, she worked 14 years as a writer, then editor, at theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology, owned by WebMD, later serving as the Global News Director for Medscape France and Medscape Germany. She divides her time between Kelowna and Sechelt, British Columbia.