Alistair MacLeod

Although born in Saskatchewan, Alistair MacLeod was raised from the age of 10 in his parents’ native home of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where his family had lived since the 1860s. After his graduation from high school in 1954, he worked a series of odd jobs in Nova Scotia and Canada, including delivering milk, teaching school, mining, and logging, while earning a B.A. at St. Francis Xavier University. He went on to complete a Master’s degree at the University of New Brunswick and a Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame, where he began writing fiction and, in the year of his graduation, published “The Boat,” which was named one of the best American short stories of 1969. Following his graduation, he became an English professor at the University of Windsor and continued writing during summer vacations, which he spent in his hometown of Cape Breton. In 1971, he married Anita MacLellan, with whom he would have 7 children over the course of a 43-year marriage. He published only five books: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, his first short story collection, in 1976; As Birds Bring Forth the Sun in 1986; the novel No Great Mischief in 1999; Island, a compilation of his short stories, in 2000; and the novella To Everything There Is A Season in 2004. In total, he wrote fewer than 20 short stories and only one novel during his lifetime. He died at the age of 77 in April of 2014.