DON BREDES lives in the hills of northern Vermont with his wife and their daughter.

He earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of California at Irvine and an AB in English Composition from Syracuse University. He has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, and he has been awarded fellowships for his fiction by the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment of the Arts.

His first novel, HARD FEELINGS (Atheneum, 1977), was an American Library Association Best Book in 1977 and a 20th Century-Fox film release in 1982. His published work includes three other novels, MULDOON (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), COLD COMFORT (Harmony Books, 2001), and THE FIFTH SEASON (Three Rivers Press, 2005). The third novel in his Hector Bellevance literary suspense series, THE ERRAND BOY, will be out with Three Rivers Press in September, 2009. He has published short stories, essays, and book reviews in a variety of publications, including “The New York Times Sunday Magazine,” “The Los Angeles Times Book Review,” and “Paris Review.”

Two of his screenplay adaptations have been independently produced and released internationally as feature-length films, “Where the Rivers Flow North,” starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox, and “A Stranger in the Kingdom,” with an ensemble cast including Ernie Hudson and Martin Sheen. They’re available on DVD.

When he’s not writing, he enjoys cooking, gardening (mostly vegetables), reading, playing tennis, hiking, birdwatching, kite-flying, star-gazing, mountain biking, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing, as the seasons permit.