Kyo Maclear
Kyo Maclear is an essayist, novelist and children’s author. She was born in London, England and moved to Toronto at the age of four with her British father (a foreign correspondent and documentary filmmaker) and Japanese mother (a painter and art dealer).
Her books have been translated into eighteen languages, published in over twenty-five countries, and garnered nominations from the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Awards, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the National Magazine Awards, among other honours.
Her latest book, Unearthing, is a story of family secrets and inheritance beyond heredity. Her hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017) was a #1 National Bestseller and winner of the Trillium Book Award and the Nautilus Book Award for Lyrical Prose. It was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Globe and Mail, CBC, Now Magazine, the National Post, Forbes, the Chicago Review of Books, and Book Riot.
Her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Brick, Border Crossings, The Millions, LitHub, The Volta, Prefix Photo, Resilience, The Guardian, Lion’s Roar, Azure, The Globe and Mail, and elsewhere. She has been a national arts reviewer for Canadian Art and a monthly arts columnist for Toronto Life.
Kyo holds a doctorate in environmental humanities teaches creative writing with The Humber School for Writers and the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA.
She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Huron-Wendat.
“One day my sister Virginia woke up feeling wolfish. She made wolf SOUNDS and did strange things...”
“The fog turned a strange yellow, then orange, then black. The gilded winged statue Victory at Buckingham Palace retreated into mist. St. Paul's was a hazy outline, ghostlike in the gloom. La Traviata at the Sadler's Wells theatre was terminated midway because the audience could no longer see the singers on stage. Pedestrians noticed how everything below the waist disappeared. Knees, shoes, dogs became indistinguishable. The Great Smog was days and nights of people and things passing out of sight and existence. It seemed a fitting time for a mother to evaporate.”
“A veteran reporter knows there is a disconnect between how an event in a region is experienced and the way it is perceived in distant capitals. He sends dispatches about violent insurrections, riots and clashes, and feels his words loom large in his mind, then become small, minuscule, in the sending,until eventually he discovers that none of his reporting produces more than a twinge or yawn in the wider world.”