Swan’s sixth book of fiction, What Casanova Told Me, links two women from different centuries through a long-lost journal about travels with Casanova in the Mediterranean. It celebrates travel as a form of love. What Casanova Told Me was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region). It was a Globe and Mail Best Book; a Calgary Herald Top 10; a Now (Toronto) Top 10; and a Sun Times (Owen Sound) Top 10; and Asked For Adams was named one of Maclean’s Top 5 literary characters for 2004. Swan shares a Puritan background with her heroine Asked For Adams. A branch of Swan’s family immigrated to America in 1635 and settled near Boston before moving to Canada two centuries later.

Recent essays by Swan have appeared in the new Carol Shields anthology, Evocation and Echo, edited by Aritha Van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse, Barkhuis Gronigen 2009 and The First Man in My Life(daughters write about their fathers) edited by Sandra Martin and re-issued by Penguin Canada 2009.

Essays by Swan have also appeared in Reader’s Digest: A Father’s Legacy, June 2009; The Globe and Mail, Mary Swann: mystery solved, April 25 2009; Granny Boots; Some grandmas just aren’t the knitting kind, Fashion, May 29 2009.  Swan’s essays have also appeared in the PEN anthology Writing Life 2006 and Dropped Threads, Random House, Canada 2003.

Swan’s 1993 novel, The Wives of Bath, (about a murder in a girls’ boarding school) was a finalist for the U.K. ‘s Guardian Award and Ontario’s Trillium Award, and was recently picked by a U.S. Readers’ Guide as one of the best novels of the nineties. A feature film based on The Wives of Bath was released in the summer of 2001 in the U.S. and Canada under the title Lost and Delirious. The film was shown in 32 countries, and picked for premiere selection at Sundance and Berlin Film Festival 2001.

Swan’s other novels include The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, based on a true-life ancestor, a giantess who exhibited with P.T. Barnum, which was a finalist for Canada’s Best First Novel Award and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. The Last of the Golden Girls, about the sexual awakening of young women in an Ontario beach resort, was originally published in 1989, and was recently reissued in hardcover. Her collection of short stories, Stupid Boys are Good to Relax With was published in 1996. Two of its stories were published in Granta and in Ms. Magazine.

Swan has retired from her position of Associate Professor of Humanities at York University. In 1999-2000, she was awarded the Millennial Robarts Chair in Canadian Studies. As chair, she hosted the successful Millennial Wisdom Symposium in Toronto featuring artists and social scientists debating the ways the past is recreated in popular culture and what wisdom the past has to offer as we move into the new century. The symposium was inspired by her research into her book about Casanova.

She was chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2007-2008) and brought in a new benefits deal for Canadian writers. She is also a member of Community Air, the Toronto civic activist group that has fought against the building of the bridge to the Toronto Island Airport.

A native of southwestern Ontario and graduate of McGill University, Susan Swan makes her home and garden in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood.

Swanisms

The following quotes are statements on a wide range of topics recently addressed by Susan, and indicate the breadth of her expertise and concerns.

On Travel:

Travel is a form of love. If you follow Casanova’s Ten
Principles of Travel, you will move in the world in a way that
emphasizes the romance of cultures instead of the clash.

On Canadian Literature:

In Canada, the literary imagination is the writer’s conscience in action.

On Fiction on the Internet:

As a form, hypertext fiction is closer to performance or installation art, which blends several disciplines like images, sound and text, than literature. But like it or lump it, the frontier of the net is still creating a whole new way to tell a story.

On Sexual Gothic:

It’s fiction that uses the body as a central metaphor for pleasure and trauma. In nineteenth century gothic stories, it was castles and ruins not our physical selves that provide the symbol of uneasiness for the reader.

On politically incorrect art:

All art and literature asks for some adjustment on the part of the viewer or reader to make it understandable in terms of their own sensibility and morals. But instead of recommending censorship in the case of sexist or racist art where the burden of adjustment may be grave, I suggest asking the question “what are we going to get in return?

Highlights From a Literary Life

1977 — performed ‘The True Confessions of the Sexual Organs’ nude at a University of Toronto Women’s Festival

1988 — obscenity charges laid by two Albertan listeners who objected to a section of The Last of the Golden Girls being read on the CBC. The charges were later dismissed by the Edmonton Morality Squad.

1989 — Swan asks Globe and Mail critic Bill French to resign on national television after he criticized her apocalptyic ending in The Last of the Golden Girls as ‘unrealistic’. Six months later he resigned.

1993 — Sold out Sexual Gothic tour in New York, Chicago and Toronto, featuring actors reading writers’ work.

1994 — Canadian External Affairs tries to deny funds for Swan’s invite to the University of Venice.

1996 — Canadian External Affairs denies funds for Swan’s invite to the Adelaide Literary Festival. Funds raised by other means.

Selected list of Honours, Awards and Grants

Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, 2007–2008
Robarts Millennial Scholar, York University, 1999-2001
Canada Council Award for Fiction, l998.
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Travel Grant, York University, 1996.
Toronto Arts Council Award for Fiction, 1996.
Canada Council Short-term Grant, Ottawa, 1995.
Ontario Arts Council Award for Works-in-Progress, 1995.
Guardian Fiction Prize Finalist, U.K., (International Award), 1993.
Trillium Finalist, Ontario, 1993.
Toronto Arts Council Award for Fiction, 1993.
Ontario Arts Council Award for Works-in-Progress, 1991.
Canada Council Award for Fiction, Ottawa, 1989.
Canada Council Award for Fiction, Ottawa, 1988.
Ontario Arts Council Award for Works-in-Progress, 1988.
Oberon, Best Canadian Stories (for Sluts), Ottawa, 1988.
Toronto Arts Council Award for Fiction, 1986.
Playwright-in-Residence, NECESSARY ANGEL, Toronto, 1985.
Canada Council Award for Fiction, Ottawa, 1984.
Finalist, Governor-General’s Award for Fiction, Ottawa, 1983.
Finalist, Governor-General’s Award for Best First Novel Contest, Ottawa, 1983

A complete list of Susan Swan’s Honours and Awards is detailed in her Curriculum Vitae.

Curriculum Vitae

Swan’s Curriculum Vitae is the most comprehensive source of information about Susan Swan, and numbers approximately 44 pages. Excerpts of this information are also included in relevant areas of the website. The detailed bibliography covers these major topics: