Dyonne Antonette Josiah

My name is Dyonne Antonette Josiah. I am from Islington, North London. I am the creator of “The Adventures of Canary Ryland”, which began over 10 years ago.

I started scribbling stories as a hobby when I was nine years old. When I was 16 years old, I discovered that I was dyslexic and realised that my struggle with reading and writing was more than me thinking that I was stupid; it was just that I had a different way of understanding things. Instead of letting dyslexia take over my life, I decided to pursue writing as a career.

I wrote stories as a way of releasing all the madness that was going on in my head. By the age of 24, I felt a passion to write children’s stories and started to take my work seriously after receiving praise from my family and friends.
In 2010, whilst at work, I was doodling on a piece of paper and created a character called “Maria”, who knew where babies came from and wanted to tell the world. After a while, I didn’t connect with the name Maria, so I changed the name from Maria to Canary. Thus, Canary Ryland was born.

The idea for the book, “The Adventures of Canary Ryland—How do you get a baby?” came to me when I was standing in the children’s section of a local book store one day and found that there were no humour books around the subject of babies. I wanted to write a story that could ease children and parents and give them the confidence to talk about the subject of babies without feeling embarrassed.

During the journey of writing this book, I have come to realize that Canary has traits that I had when I was younger, and traits that I wish my younger self had. Growing up, I wasn’t a confident child and got bullied a lot. So, I made Canary the confident child that I had always wanted to be.

Thank you for joining me on my adventure!

Dyonne Antonette