Katherine Govier

Katherine Govier is the author of nine novels and three short story collections. Her most recent novel The Ghost Brush is about the daughter of the famous Japanese printmaker, Hokusai, creator of The Great Wave. Her novel Creation, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003. Katherine's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the United Kingdom, the United States, and throughout the Commonwealth, and in translation in Holland, Italy, Turkey, and Slovenia. She is the winner of Canada's Marian Engel Award for a woman writer (1997) and the Toronto Book Award (1992). Katherine has been instrumental in establishing three innovative writing programs. In 1989, with teacher Trevor Owen, she helped found Writers in Electronic Residence. She also helped design, and taught in a program at Sheridan College for immigrant and refugee writers. She is also the editor of two collections of travel essays and the director of The Shoe Project with the Bata Shoe Museum. She lives in Toronto with her partner, a food and wine publisher, and their dog Jasper. She is a two-time black belt in classical martial arts and a tai chi practitioner.