Margaret MacPherson

Raised in Yellowknife (now Denendeh) NWT, Margaret quickly got an education in the real world, traveling extensively in Europe, Australia, and Central America before settling into an English Lit undergraduate degree in the early 80’s at the Univerity of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Margaret wrote for periodicals and magazines (as well as being sole employee of a Halifax volunteer-run leftist bookstore) during her eight years in Atlantic Canada before venturing to Bermuda as a full-time reporter.

Returning to Canada in 1992, Margaret embarked on a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from UBC and completed the program as a visiting grad student at Edmonton’s U of A. She published a few contract non-fiction books as well as a biography of firebrand Nellie McClung called Voice for the Voiceless in the early 2000’s but it was the publication of her short story collection Perilous Departures that launched her career. Her first novel Released followed in 2009 and in 2011 her second novel Body Trade won the DeBeers NorthWords Prize for Fiction.

Meanwhile, Margaret acted as a fiction editor of Other Voices literary journal, became a driving force in the Alberta Branch of the Canadian Authors Association and was elected the Alberta/NWT Rep for The Writer’s Union of Canada.

Margaret formed an extraordinary network of creatives during two plus decades in Edmonton, living with her partner and three (occasionally four) children during her middle years she worked as a Writer-in-Residence for the Edmonton Public Library and mentored writers though the Writers Guild of Alberta.

She paints, travels, laughs long and often, and continues to explore and record the mystical communion of living things. Margaret has recently moved to Deep River in northern Ontario to begin her third act with her partner of countless wonderful years.