Merilyn Simonds is the author of 3 eborn books and 20 published fiction and nonfiction works, including The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and the Canadian creative nonfiction classic, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Originally adapted for the stage by Layne Coleman and premiered at Toronto’s Theatre Passe-Muraille, a new adaptation was commissioned in 2016 from Canada’s premier playwright, Judith Thompson, under the title Hot House. In 2017, Project Bookmark Canada erected a plaque at the site of the former penitentiary quarry to honour the place of The Convict Lover in Canada’s literary landscape.
Simonds’ fiction has been anthologized and published internationally in eight countries in Europe, the UK, North America, and Asia. In 2018, the National Arts Centre Orchestra toured Europe with Dear Life, a symphony by Zosha di Castri based on Simonds’ adaptation of the Alice Munro story of that name. Her essay “Where Do You Think You Are?” was recently published in The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro.
Her books include a collection of personal essays, A New Leaf: Growing with my Garden, a travel memoir Breakfast at the Exit Café, and The Paradise Project, a collection of flash fiction hand-printed on a 19th-century press with endpapers made in part from plants from her garden. The experience of producing the collection in both a digital and a book-arts edition is the subject of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels, and the Lasting Impression of Books, named a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her most recent novel Refuge was published to acclaim in 2018. And in spring 2022, ECW press released her innovative memoir/biography Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Birds of Pimisi Bay, which won the 2022 Foreword Indies Nonfiction Award. Walking with Beth: Conversations with my 100-Year-Old Friend, published in September, 2025, became an instant bestseller.
Simonds has been writer-in-residence and taught creative writing at several universities, the Banff Centre, and Sage Hill Writing Experience. She mentors emerging writers working in both fiction and creative nonfiction across North America and Mexico. The Merilyn Simonds Protégé Project was set up to honour her work mentoring young writers. She is a Past Chair of the The Writers Union of Canada.
Simonds lives with her partner, writer Wayne Grady, in Kingston, Ontario, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
