Sharon Kirsch is a writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, and journalism whose literary passions range from companion beaver to celebrated hustlers to buried treasure. She was born and raised in Montreal, where The Smallest Objective, her award-winning memoir and family history, is set. This first-person narrative produces startling discoveries about several Montreal personalities as revealed by the objects that survive them—a microscope and lantern slides, a worn recipe book, a nugget of fool’s gold.

Sharon's debut book of creative non-fiction, What Species of Creatures, was an imaginative retelling of first encounters between early settlers to North America and unfamiliar “beasts,” described by reviewers as “remarkable and unsettling” (Brian Fawcett), “tightly argued and beautifully written” (Anthropozoologica, France), and “revealing and often humorous” (The Beaver magazine).

As the recipient of a Commonwealth Scholarship for postgraduate study in Middle English literature, Sharon lived in York, United Kingdom, before launching a career in Toronto as an in-house book editor and freelance writer. Her travel stories from those years appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. More recently, Sharon’s prose has been published in literary magazines such as Room and subTerrain and is forthcoming in the US journal Terrain.