Alison MacLeod is a Canadian and English novelist, short story writer and essayist born in Montréal. All the Beloved Ghosts is her latest book of short stories (March 2017). During her writer’s life, Alison was rewarded several times. Get more information about the author, her book, its ratings and reviews hereafter.
Alison MacLeod is a Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester. She also teaches and mentors for groups such as the Arvon Foundation and New Writing South. She is Associate Editor of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books).
Alison was raised in Canada. She lives in Brighton, England, country in which she settled in 1987. A citizen of both Canada and the U.K., she still often visits her native country.
She has written for The Sunday Times, the Guardian, Prospect and The Ottawa Citizen, and has been a guest on BBC programmes such as Open Book, Front Row, The Verb and Woman’s Hour. She has appeared at numerous literary festivals, including The Charleston International Festival, The Sunday Times Oxford Festival, The Jaipur Literature Festival and The Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Moreover, MacLeod has served as a judge for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, The Mslexia Prize, The International Manchester Fiction Prize, The London Magazine Prize, and The Charleston-Chichester Award.
Her previous works include the novels The Changeling (1996), The Wave Theory of Angels (2005), and the short story collection, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction (2007).
In 2008, her story ‘Dirty Weekend’ won The Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Award.
Her novel, Unexploded was long-listed for the 2013 Man-Booker Prize for Fiction and was one of the Observer’s ‘Books of the Year’. In recent years, she has been nominated for The BBC National Short Story Award and The Sunday Times EFG International Short Story Award.
In 2016, Alison MacLeod was jointly awarded The Eccles British Library Writer’s Award. The award is made possible by the generosity of the Eccles Centre at the British Library. The Centre promotes awareness of the vast North American and Caribbean collection at the British Library, the largest collection outside the U.S.
Let’s discover today her collection of short stories, All the Beloved Ghosts (published in March 2017):
Synopsis:
Acutely observed, evocative collection of short stories from the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of Unexploded,blending fiction, biography and memoir Hovering on the border of life and death, these stories form a ground-shifting collection, taking us into history, literature and the hidden lives of iconic figures. In 1920s Nova Scotia, as winter begins to thaw, a woman wears a new fur coat to a dance that will change everything. A teenager searches for his lover on a charged summer evening in 2011, as around him London erupts in anger. A cardiac specialist lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he awaits a new heart – and is transported into the past. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overcome by all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes. Precise, playful and evocative, these exquisitely crafted stories unfold at the line between reality and fiction, capturing the unexpected joys, small tragedies and profound truths of existence.