Robin McGrath

The daughter of former Newfoundland politician James McGrath,^[1] she completed a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Western Ontario, and later taught at the University of Alberta.^[1] During her academic career, she also wrote for the London Free Press and the Edmonton Journal, and published Canadian Inuit Literature: The Development of a Tradition, one of the first-ever academic studies of Inuit oral literary traditions.^[2] She left academia and returned to St. John's in 1993 to pursue creative writing.^[1]

She published the short fiction collection Trouble and Desire in 1996,^[3] which was a Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award nominee in 1998.^[4]

Escaped Domestics, her first poetry collection, followed in 1998.^[5] The book was a J. M. Abraham Poetry Award nominee,^[6] and won a Canadian Jewish Book Award for poetry in 1999.^[7]

In 1999, she published the young adult novel Hoist Your Sails and Run.^[8] The book was a nominee for the Ann Connor Brimer Award in 2001.^[9] In 2002, the Resource Centre for the Arts staged her theatrical play A Mountain of Shoes, about a young Holocaust survivor who settles in Newfoundland,^[10] and she published the novel Donovan's Station.^[11] The novel was a Commonwealth Writers Prize nominee for Canada and the Caribbean in 2003.^[12]

In 2005, she published the poetry collection Covenant of Salt,^[13] for which she received another J.M. Abraham Poetry Award nomination in 2006.^[14]

Her 2009 novel The Winterhouse won a Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction in 2010.^[15]

She has also published the novels Gone to the Ice (2003),^[16] and Livyers World (2007)^[17] and the non-fiction books Salt Fish and Shmattes: The History of the Jews in Newfoundland and Labrador from 1770 (2006), a history of the Jewish community in Newfoundland and Labrador,^[18] and Life on the Mista Shipu: Dispatches from Labrador (2018).^[19]