Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1936, but by the age of ten had returned with his family to their farm in Cape Breton. After completing high school, MacLeod attended teacher's college in Truro and then taught school. Deciding to further his education, he attended St. Francis Xavier University between 1957 and 1960 when graduated with a BA and B.Ed. MacLeod then went on to receive his MA in 1961 from the University of New Brunswick and his PhD in 1968 from the University of Notre Dame. A specialist in British literature of the nineteenth century, MacLeod taught English for three years at the University of Indiana before accepting a post in 1969 at the University of Windsor where he remains a professor of English and Creative Writing to this day. He and his family return to Cape Breton every summer, however, where he spends part of his time "writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island."

What is most amazing about the career of Alistair MacLeod is that his great critical reputation stems from a mere fourteen short stories, collected in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986). In 1999, he published his first novel, No Great Mischief, which follows the lives of several generations of a family that emigrates from Scotland to Cape Breton, the setting of many of MacLeod's short stories. Written over the course of thirteen years, No Great Mischief was published to great critical acclaim and is already in the process of being translated into a number of different languages. Nominated for all of Canada's major literary awards, the novel was awarded the Trillium Prize. The success of No Great Mischief was followed in 2000 by Island, which collects in a single volume all of his previously published short stories and one new one.

Although, relatively speaking, MacLeod has published very little in the thirty years since his first published short story, "The Boat" (1968), the undeniable quality and extraordinary craftsmanship of his work has earned him international critical acclaim. While his limited output has perhaps had a negative impact on his popularity on Canada -- to many of even the most devoted readers of Canadian literature he remained relatively unknown, at least until the recent publication of his novel -- his works can and should be considered among the very best this country has produced in the twentieth century.

If you've not yet had a chance to read anything by Alistair MacLeod, stop whatever you're doing and take a day or two to read Island from cover to cover. Then start all over again and savour every word. After that, move on to No Great Mischief and you'll be ready to start the whole process over again. Everyone to whom we've recommended MacLeod's books over the last few months has only been able to put them down long enough to say "I can't believe I've never heard of this writer before!" This was precisely the reaction of Irish novelist Colm Tóibín when he recently was one of the two judges who for the Modern Library selected the top 200 novels in English since 1950. Writes Tóibín, "Reading these two books, knowing that I could tell other readers about them, was the high point of the Modern Library Project for me."

Books by Alistair Macleod available from Northwest Passages

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