17 Facts About Marian Engel

Marian Ruth Engel was a Canadian novelist and a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada.

Marian Engel's father taught auto mechanics, taking on positions at schools across southwestern Ontario.

The family moved frequently and Marian Engel spent time as a child in Port Arthur, Brantford, Galt, Hamilton and Sarnia.

In 1960 Marian Engel was awarded a Rotary Foundation Scholarship and spent a year studying French Literature at the Universite d'Aix-Marseille in Aix-en Provence, France.

Marian Engel met Howard Marian Engel, a mystery novel writer and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio producer in Canada, and married him in England in 1962.

Marian Engel began to raise a family, twin children, William Lucas Passmore and Charlotte Helen Arabella, and to pursue a writing career.

Marian Engel taught briefly at The Study in Montreal, as well as at McGill University, the University of Montana-Missoula and St John's School in Cyprus.

Marian Engel was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from 1977 to 1978 and served the same role at the University of Toronto from 1980 to 1982.

Marian Engel was a passionate activist for the rights of Canadian writers on the national and international stage.

Marian Engel was the first chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, established in 1973, with early meetings taking place in her Toronto home.

Marian Engel argued that authors are expected "to live off that vapourous substance "prestige"" and suggested that the uncompensated use of Canadian writers' work is a violation of copyright.

Marian Engel's first published novel, No Clouds of Glory, was published in 1968.

Marian Engel was an avid journal keeper and she used them primarily as a repository for memories and details from which she drew for her fiction.

Marian Engel's writing illustrated contemporary life with a focus on the day to day experiences of women.

Author Alice Munro disagreed, noting that Marian Engel was one of the first to examine women's lives "at their most muddled", demonstrating it was possible to not only write but be published while writing about female experiences.

Marian Engel died in Toronto, of cancer, on February 16,1985.

Elizabeth and the Golden City, the novel Marian Engel was working on at the time of her death, was left unfinished.