Allan Stratton

Allan Stratton began in theatre as an actor and playwright before turning increasingly to fiction. His official career account connects his stage experience to tight structure, dialogue, and character stakes, and his books range from adult satire to young-adult social realism, fantasy, horror, and family drama.

Chanda's Secrets began with a 2002 conversation about HIV/AIDS and developed through research in Botswana with people living with HIV/AIDS, health workers, educators, and community organizations. Stratton has explained that he fictionalized the setting to avoid presenting one country's political and social life as though he could capture it completely, keeping the novel's attention on family dynamics, secrecy, stigma, and the healing force of truth.

His account of craft emphasizes patient development and revision. He works from a flexible outline, revises the preceding pages to recover the flow of a draft, tests new material with candid readers, and continues shaping it with editors. That practice sits alongside a long catalogue of novels and plays and a continuing public conversation about how theatre, fiction, education, and lived experience inform one another.

The American Library Association named Chanda's Secrets a 2005 Michael L. Printz Honor book. Its screen adaptation, Life, Above All, appeared in the 2010 Cannes Un Certain Regard selection as a South African-German production, carrying the novel's concerns with secrecy, prejudice, family separation, and a young person's search for truth into film.