Merilyn Simonds was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, spent her childhood in Brazil and came of age in a small town in southwestern Ontario. She began as a freelance journalist, publishing nine nonfiction books and scores of magazine articles on subjects ranging from the environment to soap-making, from art and architecture to war. She was a founding editor of This Country Canada, associate editor at Harrowsmith Magazine and contributing editor at Harrowsmith, Equinox, Canadian Geographic and Saturday Night Magazines.With the release of The Convict Lover in 1996, she became nationally known as a literary writer, exploring the zone where fact and fiction meet. Now considered a classic in Canadian creative nonfiction, The Convict Lover was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction and was chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 1996 by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, Elm Street and Maclean's. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese, and German, and in 1997, was adapted for the stage by Layne Coleman and Carol Corbeil for the Kingston Summer Theatre Festival, premiering at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in the fall of 1998. In February 2016, a new play inspired by The Convict Lover and written by Canadian playwright, Judith Thompson, will premier at Theatre Kingston. The Holding, Simonds's first novel, was published in 2004 to unanimously favourable reviews and spent five months on the Canadian Booksellers' Association bestseller list. Published in Germany and the United States the following year, it was selected a New York Times Review of Books "Editor's Choice." Simonds' collection of linked, autobiographical stories, The Lion in the Room Next Door, was published in the UK, the US, and Germany, and became a Canadian national bestseller. Her short fiction has been anthologized internationally and was included in a special 2009 issue of Journal of the Americas on Canadian literature and art. Her short story "Miss You Already" was published in Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In August 2012 she published a collection of flash fiction,The Paradise Project, which was handset and printed with a hand-operated 19th century press, and featuring handmade endpapers made in part from plants in her garden.Breakfast at the Exit Café: Travels in America, a travel memoir cowritten with her husband, Wayne Grady, was selected a Globe 100 best book of 2010, Joseph Boyden called it "a brilliant road trip I never wanted to end." The following year she published A New Leaf: Growing with my Garden, a collection of personal essays adapted from her webblog, frugalistagardener.com. She has edited two anthologies: A Literary Companion to Gardens (2008) and A Literary Companion to the Night (2009).Simonds has been writer-in-residence at Green College, University of British Columbia, and in Whistler. She has taught creative writing at Kwantlen University, the University of British Columbia, the Banff Centre, and Sage Hill Writing Experience. She privately mentors writers working in both fiction and creative nonfiction. In 2012-13 she was Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada. She currently writes a monthly literary column, AboutBooks, in the Kingston Whig Standard. She was Founding Artistic Director of Kingston WritersFest and built that festival into one of the top literary festivals in Canada with attendance of 10,000. The Merilyn Simonds Protégé Project was set up in honour of her work mentoring young writers. In September 2015, "Dear Life" premiered in Ottawa, Canada, a symphony by Zosha di Castri, commissioned by Alexander Shelley, the incoming musical director of the Canadian National Arts Centre Orchestra and based on an adaptation by Merilyn Simonds, with voice recording by Shakespearean actress Martha Henry, soprano voice by Erin Wall, photography by Larry Towell, media production by Turbine, and creative direction by Donna Feore of the Stratford Festival. In March, 2016, Simonds' essay "Where do you think you are?" will appear in the Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro. Merilyn Simonds lives with writer and translator Wayne Grady in Kingston, Ontario.www.merilynsimonds.com