Alistair MacLeod

Alistair MacLeod
Cape Breton University, 2012
Born	(1936-07-20)July 20, 1936 North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada
Died	April 20, 2014(2014-04-20) (aged 77) Windsor, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, professor
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	St. Francis Xavier University, University of Notre Dame
Notable works	No Great Mischief, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories

Alistair MacLeod, OC FRSC (July 20, 1936 – April 20, 2014) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and academic. His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Island's rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present. MacLeod has been praised for his verbal precision, his lyric intensity and his use of simple, direct language that seems rooted in an oral tradition.

Although he is known as a master of the short story, MacLeod's 1999 novel No Great Mischief was voted Atlantic Canada's greatest book of all time. The novel also won several literary prizes including the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

In 2000, MacLeod's two books of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986), were re-published in the volume Island: The Collected Stories. MacLeod compared his fiction writing to playing an accordion. "When I pull it out like this," he explained, "it becomes a novel, and when I compress it like this, it becomes this intense short story."

MacLeod taught English and creative writing for more than three decades at the University of Windsor, but returned every summer to the Cape Breton cabin on the MacLeod homestead where he did much of his writing. In the introduction to a book of essays on his work, editor Irene Guilford concluded: "Alistair MacLeod's birthplace is Canadian, his emotional heartland is Cape Breton, his heritage Scottish, but his writing is of the world."

MacLeod's Scottish ancestors emigrated to Cumberland County, Nova Scotia from the Isle of Eigg in the 1790s. They settled at Cape d'Or on the Bay of Fundy where it appears they leased farmland. In 1808, the parents with their seven daughters and two sons walked from Cape d'Or to Inverness County, Cape Breton, a distance of 362 kilometres, after hearing they could become landowners there. An account of the journey, written by MacLeod himself, says the family took their possessions with them, six head of cattle and a horse. He adds there were few roads at the time, so his great-great-great-grandparents followed the shoreline.