Amanda Leduc
Canadian writer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amanda Leduc is a Canadian writer. She is known for her books Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space and The Centaur's Wife.
Amanda Leduc | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Website | amandaleduc |
Career
Leduc's first novel, The Miracles of Ordinary Men, was published in 2013 by ECW Press. The novel alternates perspectives between Sam, a man who has recently begun sprouting wings, and Lilah.[1]
From 2016 - 2024 Leduc was the communications and development coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity in Brampton, Ontario.[2][3] FOLD is Canada's first festival for diverse authors and stories.[4]
In 2020, Leduc's non-fiction book, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space was published by Coach House Books.[5] The book discusses representations of disability in fairy tales.[6] Disfigured is part memoir and explores Leduc's personal experiences as a disabled person.[7] Leduc was interested in challenging the idea that disability is "synonymous with an unhappy ending".[8] She began writing it after walking in the forest in 2018 and considering how forests, the setting of many fairy tales, are often inherently inaccessible to disabled individuals.[9]
Leduc's 2021 novel, The Centaur's Wife, grew out of a short story of the same name that she wrote in 2014.[10] Leduc originally thought the story would be a novella.[11] Between 2016 and 2019, she re-wrote the novel four times.[10] The Centaur's Wife builds on the themes and ideas of Disfigured insofar as it is a fairy tale that centres disability and difference.[12] The book is dedicated to Leduc's friend Jess, who died in 2019 shortly after the completion of the manuscript.[11]
In 2022, Leduc was a Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer in Residence with the Hamilton Public Library.[13] Leduc's fourth book and third novel, Wild Life, was published in March 2025 and longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.[14]
Personal life
Leduc was born in British Columbia.[9] She has congenital cerebral palsy and as a young child developed a limp as a consequence of an operation to remove a cyst from her brain.[15] Leduc also has spastic hemiplegia.[8]
Leduc currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario.[9]
Works
Awards
In 2015, Leduc was a finalist for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Fiction.[9] Leduc's short story, "All This, and Heaven Too", was long-listed for the 2019 CBC short story prize.[18] Disfigured was nominated for a 2021 Aurora Award in the category Best Related Work[19] and was nominated in the non-fiction category at the 28th annual Hamilton Literary Awards.[20] It was also nominated in the non-fiction category at the 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards.[21] The Centaur's Wife was a finalist for the Ontario Library Associations' 2022 Evergreen Awards.[22]
Her novel Wild Life was longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize,[23] and for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in 2026.[24]