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Mary Swan

Mary Swan is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is also a trained librarian with a keen eye for history. Her novel The Boys in the Trees, a shortlisted nominee for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, was inspired by a newspaper clipping concerning a death within a family.

Swan was the winner of the 2001 O. Henry Award for short fiction for her short story "The Deep", which was published in The Malahat Review. That story later became the title story of her debut short story collection The Deep and Other Stories in 2002.

A graduate of York University and the University of Guelph, she currently resides in Guelph, Ontario with her family.


“Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.”
Mary Swan
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“If this world can exist, then anything is possible.”
Mary Swan
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