Pauline Holdstock

Pauline Holdstock is a British-Canadian novelist, essayist and short fiction writer with a focus on historical fiction.

Born and raised in England, she came to Canada in 1974, and resides in Victoria, British Columbia.

After a ten-year teaching career in the UK, the Caribbean, and Canada, she wrote her first novel. The Blackbird's Song (1989) launched her professional full-time writing career when it was shortlisted for the Books in Canada/W.H. Smith Best First Novel Award and subsequently reviewed favourably in the UK. She is the author of ten works of fiction and non-fiction in addition to reviews and articles for national newspapers and for websites. Her books have been published in the UK, the US, Portugal, Brazil, Australia and Germany as well as in Canada. Her novel Beyond Measure brought Holdstock's work to a wider audience, being a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and winning the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Fiction Award. Her novella The World of Light Were We Live, as yet unpublished in book form, was the winner of the Malahat Review Novella Contest 2006. Into the Heart of the Country, the story of Samuel Hearne's surrender of Prince of Wales Fort, was published in 2011 and longlisted for the Giller Prize. Her most recent novel, The Hunter and the Wild Girl, listed as a best book for 2015 by both the CBC and the National Post, was a finalist for the BC Book Prizes in 2016 and went on to win the City of Victoria Butler Book prize. Holdstock's other literary activities include presentations, sessional teaching (University of Victoria), mentoring (Banff Centre for the Arts), adjudicating arts awards and co-producing a literary reading series.