Her debut short story collection, Way Up, was published in 2003.[2] It was a shortlisted finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award[3] and the ReLit Award for short fiction in 2004. Her first novel, The Nettle Spinner, was published in 2005, and was a shortlisted nominee for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.[4] Her second novel, Perfecting, followed in 2009.[5] Her most recent novel, All the Broken Things, was published in 2014 by Random House of Canada.[3][6] It was a shortlisted finalist for the Toronto Book Award,[7] long listed for Canada Reads in 2016, and was a national bestseller.
Kuitenbrouwer has also been a book reviewer for The Globe and Mail and the National Post, and has published short fiction in Granta, The Walrus, Numéro Cinq, Significant Objects, Maclean's Magazine, and Storyville.[8]
In 2018, Kuitenbrouwer received a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto, where she was supervised by Mari Ruti. Her Ph.D. thesis is a psychoanalytic investigation into creativity, with special attention to the British novel in the eighteenth century.
In 2023 she published the novel Wait Softly Brother,[9] which was longlisted for the Giller Prize.[10]
As of 2025, Kuitenbrouwer is a writing mentor in the Master of Fine Arts in Fiction program at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.[11]
