28 Facts About Susan Swan

Susan Swan was born on 9 June 1945 and is a Canadian author, journalist, and professor.

Susan Swan's fiction has been published in 20 countries and translated into 10 languages.

Susan Swan is the co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary award in the world for women and non binary fiction authors, and received an Order of Canada in 2023 for her writing and its contribution to Canadian literature and for mentoring the next generation of writers.

Susan Swan's novels include The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, The Last of The Golden Girls, The Wives of Bath, What Casanova Told Me, and The Western Light.

Susan Swan was the Robarts Scholar for Canadian Studies at York University from 1999 to 2000 and taught in the Faculty of Humanities at York University from 1991 to 2007 before retiring as a professor to concentrate on her writing.

Susan Swan grew up in Midland, Ontario, and has a younger brother John.

Susan Swan was a bookworm as a child and wrote stories to entertain herself and her friends.

An early short story by Susan Swan was deemed plagiarism by her Grade Seven teacher who said the writing was too good to have been written by a young girl.

Susan Swan attended Midland Public School and as a teenager, she worked as a reporter on the Midland Free Press.

Susan Swan was editor of The McGill Scene, a newspaper for Montreal high school students that was banned under Susan Swan's editorship.

Susan Swan later worked as a reporter for several Toronto daily newspapers before turning to magazine freelance and novel writing.

On 27 March 1969, she married Barry Haywood in the boardroom of The Telegram, where Susan Swan was the education reporter.

Susan Swan is a writer and journalist who was a performance artist from 1975 to 1979, performing odes on subjects like self-pity and figure skater Barbara Ann Scott called Queen of the Silver Blades.

Susan Swan's novel, The Western Light, is a prequel to The Wives of Bath.

Susan Swan's 1993 novel The Wives of Bath, a darkly humorous tale about a murder in a girls' boarding school, was a finalist for the UK's Guardian Fiction Prize and Ontario's Trillium Book Award.

In collaboration with editor Janice Zawerbny, Susan Swan was one of the founders of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

Susan Swan coined the term "sexual gothic" to describe contemporary gothic novels that use the body as the site of the narrative the way 19th-century gothic novels used a ruined building as their literary setting.

Susan Swan compared the burden to the less difficult adjustment one makes reading Shakespeare or say, any novel where the gender and race of the protagonist are different from the gender and race of the reader.

Susan Swan said: "The burden of adjustment becomes a problem when a great work of art or literature either appears to portray or portrays one of the groups you or I belong to as stereotyped or inferior".

Susan Swan advocated putting up with the burden of adjustment when the text gave the reader a major reward.

Susan Swan's theory was outlined in a talk at the York University premier lecture series on 26 February 1998.

Early on, Susan Swan was encouraged by the success of prominent Canadian women writers like Marian Engel who wrote the novel Bear and Margaret Atwood, who like Susan Swan, works in many disciplines.

Susan Swan once asked The Globe and Mail fiction critic William French to resign on television because he criticized the apocalyptic ending of The Last of the Golden Girls as "unrealistic".

Susan Swan argued that literary realism is itself an artificial construct and not realistic in the sense French meant.

Susan Swan has taught creative writing workshops all over Europe and recently retired from teaching creative writing as an associate professor of humanities at York University to focus on her books.

Susan Swan was appointed to the Order of Canada in June 2023.

Susan Swan was chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and brought in a new benefits deal for Canadian writers.

Susan Swan is a member of Community Air, a group of Toronto citizens opposed to the expansion of the Island Airport.