Robin McGrath (born March 29, 1949) is a Canadian writer from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. [1]
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]