Merilyn Simonds > Biography

A Short Biography

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1949, Merilyn Simonds spent her childhood in Brazil and was educated at the University of Western Ontario. As an award-winning freelance journalist, she published nine nonfiction books and scores of magazine articles on subjects ranging from the environment to soap-making, from art and architecture to war.

With the release of The Convict Lover, published by Macfarlane, Walter & Ross in 1996, Simonds became nationally known as a literary writer, exploring the zone where fact and fiction meet. The Convict Lover was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction and was chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 1996 by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire Magazine, Elm Street Magazine and Maclean’s. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese, and German, and in 1997, was adapted for the stage by the Kingston Summer Theatre Festival, premiering at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in the fall of 1998.

The Lion in the Room Next Door, Simonds’s collection of linked, autobiographical stories, was published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1999 to enthusiastic reviews and like The Convict Lover, became a national bestseller. The following year, it was published by Bloomsbury in England, by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in the United States and by btb in Germany.

The Holding is Simonds's first novel. Published as McClelland & Stewart's lead fiction title in the spring of 2004, it was on the Canadian Booksellers' Association bestseller list for five months and quickly became a book club favourite.. Aritha van Herk, writing in the Globe and Mail, called it "a dense and complex novel . . . as engrossing as the most intensely crafted psychological drama. Compelling, hypnotic." Audrey Thomas, in her review in the National Post, described it as "beautiful and unsettling . . . An extremely sensuous book, a lush book, not to be read in a hurry."In the fall of 2005 it was published in the United States, where it was selected a New York Times "Editor's Choice." The novel was released in Germany in 2007.

In 2005, her story "Miss You Already" was published in Germany. in an anthology of international women writers called 17 Frauen ziehen einen Mann aus (17 Women Undress a Man). It was published in English in the November 2005 issue of Walrus magazine, and in Dutch in a May 2006 issue of Vrij Nederland. In spring 2007, it was included in a Dutch anthology of international fiction, Een Goed Verhaal.

Simonds has edited two anthologies: Gardens: A Literary Companion (2008) and Night: A Literary Companion (2009). She is currently working on a novel, C., and a travel memoir, jointly authored with her husband, called The Long Way Home. A selection of flash fictions from her work-in-progress The Paradise Project was recently featured in the Journal of the Americas special issue on contemporary Canadian writing.

A passionate gardener, Simonds lives with writer Wayne Grady in a two-hundred-year-old stone house on a small acreage north of Kingston, where she is gradually converting two acres of lawn to gardens, growing thousands of seedlings every spring, many from seed she collects herself. Although her gardens and writing keep her close to home, she loves to travel, especially to Mexico, where part of her new novel takes place. She has two sons by an earlier marriage — Karl, a musician, and Erik, a visual artist whose painting is on the cover of the original Canadian edition of The Lion in the Room Next Door and who designed this website.