Canadian writer Heather Birrell is the author of the novel Born, a poetry collection, Float and Scurry and two story collections, Mad Hope and I know you are but what am I?.
As well as the mechanisms and mysteries of individual consciousness, Heather’s writing is concerned with how we give care and exist in community. Her work has been honoured with the Gerald Lampert Award for poetry, the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for non-fiction. She has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards and Arc Magazine’s Poem of the Year Award. Her poem “Wind” was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2022. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many North American journals and anthologies, including The New Quarterly, Toronto Noir, Descant, pinhole poetry, and The Malahat Review.
Heather’s essay about motherhood – its joys and discontents – appeared in The M Word, an anthology that broadens the conversation about what mothering means today and her essay “Further Up and Further In: Re-reading C.S. Lewis in the Wake of Mental Illness”, published in Canadian Notes and Queries, was a notable mention in Best American Essays 2017.
As a book reviewer and essayist, Heather has contributed to such publications as The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire, Books in Canada, and The Believer. She is also a fellow of several writers’ residencies: Spain’s Fundacion Valparaiso, the MacDowell Colony in the US, and Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle.
Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Access Copyright Foundation through the Saskatchewan Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.
She is also immensely grateful to the incredible Toronto Public Library system, which has granted her, and many others, the space to think and dream (and to access other people’s thoughts and dreams).
Heather works as a high school teacher and creative writing instructor. She has spent extended periods in the Kingdom of Fife and the Isle of Lewis in Scotland but now lives in her hometown of Toronto with her mother, her husband, and their two daughters.
If you’d like to learn more about Heather’s process, try here: https://tnq.ca/writing-spaces-heather-birrell/ and https://pinholepoetry.ca/an-interview-with-heather-birrell/.
You can also read a story at the fabulous on-line magazine The Puritan: http://puritan-magazine.com/hands-to-heaven-heather-birrell/
If poetry’s your bag, you can find some of Heather’s work here: Snow Day Poem, Oh, Sunday Evenings, Fairy Tale and here: FLASHMAN.
She would love to hear from you! Please contact her here.
