Canadian writer Heather Birrell is the author of a poetry collection, Float and Scurry and two story collections, Mad Hope and I know you are but what am I?.  

Heather’s work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction and has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards, as well as Arc Magazine’s poem of the year award. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many North American journals and anthologies, including The New Quarterly, Descant, Arc Magazine, Hobart, and Toronto Noir.  

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.

If you’d like to learn more about Heather’s process, try here: https://tnq.ca/writing-spaces-heather-birrell/

You can listen to Heather reading from the Journey Prize winning ‘BriannaSusannaAlana’ at www.authorsaloud.com.

And listen to the dulcet-toned Miette read Heather’s story ‘Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning‘ and ‘Trouble at Pow Crash Creek’ at www.miettecast.com.

You can also read a new-ish 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: http://arcpoetry.ca/2019/07/30/snow-day-poem-2/

and here:

http://www.minolareview.com/heather-birrell

and here:

http://theweekshallinherittheverse.blogspot.com/2018/02/heather-birrell.html

As a book reviewer, Heather has contributed to such publications as the Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, 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.

Heather also works as a high school teacher and a creative writing instructor.  She was recently on leave on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, but is now living back in her hometown of Toronto with her husband, her mother, and their two daughters.

She would love to hear from you! Please contact her here.