Claudia Casper

Claudia Casper is a Canadian writer. She is best known for her bestseller novel The Reconstruction, about a woman who constructs a life-sized model of the hominid Lucy for a museum diorama while trying to recreate herself. Her third novel, The Mercy Journals, written as the journals of a soldier suffering PTSD in the year 2047, won the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished Science fiction.

Early life Claudia Casper was born in Toronto, Ontario. She was her parents' only child, but she now has ten half-siblings. She says that her "siblings ... who often spoke no common language and three parents who couldn't be further apart on the introversion/extroversion continuum," helped her develop "an early ability to bridge realities." As a result of her diverse family, she learned German, Spanish, French and some Hebrew.

Casper attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute in Toronto, but then transferred to SEED Alternative School, one of Toronto's first free schools, which she describes as seeming like "a slightly scary hotbed of creativity, drugs and sex," where she learned at her own pace and chose her own curriculum. Casper says The Reconstruction was "sparked by a desire to explore what it meant to be a woman living today who is descended from Lucy." The Reconstruction was published in 1996 by Penguin and became a bestseller. The New York Times called it a "probing book," and The Globe and Mail said, "The writing is beautiful, with passages of dazzling poetic intensity on nearly every page." It was optioned for a film and published in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

While writing her second novel, The Continuation of Love by Other Means, Casper also wrote book reviews for The Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun. and "Victory," which appeared in Dropped Threads: What We Aren't Told alongside Margaret Atwood and Miriam Toews, edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson and published by Vintage Canada in 2001.

With friend Anne Giardini, Carol Shields' daughter, Casper created the Carol Shields Labyrinth, an interactive labyrinth website that honours Shields' life.

Casper's second novel, The Continuation of Love by Other Means, explores gender conflict through the relationship of a right-leaning father and left-wing daughter in Argentina during the Dirty War. It was published by Penguin in 2003 ) and short-listed for the Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize.

"Casper's third novel, The Mercy Journals, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, was released in Canada and the U.S. by Arsenal Pulp Press. Mary Woodbury of eco-fiction.com wrote, "The Mercy Journals offers a view into the near future after climate change results in a far different world than the one we know today, a world in which a Mexican border horror wall comes alive, a world in which the surreal, bizarre, and beautiful begin to triumph via character redemption and hope." Christine Canfield at forewordreviews.com in a starred review wrote, "This complex tale puts global crises and personal crises hand in hand, and questions if morality can stay the same or must adapt." Casper sees her three novels as "a trio about our species: evolution, reproduction and war—light topics, every one." and was a faculty member at the 2016 Iceland Writers Retreat.