Isabel Huggan

Isabel Huggan (born 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario) is a prize-winning Canadian author of fiction and personal essays.

Isabel Huggan spent her childhood in Elmira, a small southern Ontario town where her father worked as a manager for the Canadian branch of an American chemical company. She studied English and Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario and in 1965 moved to Toronto to work in publishing. She spent a year traveling in Europe, then returned to Canada and in 1968 began teaching English, Theatre and Creative Writing in Ontario high schools.

In 1970 she married journalist Robert Huggan. They lived in Toronto for two years and then bought an old farm house in Belleville in eastern Ontario, where she was a reporter, photographer and columnist for the local newspaper, The Intelligencer, and he was journalism teacher at the local community college. In the mid-1970s she began publishing poetry and short stories in Canadian literary magazines; in 1977, after leaving her job, she gave birth to a daughter.

In 1976 Isabel Huggan won first prize in a National Film Board of Canada contest for women scriptwriters for a film script based on her short story “Celia Behind Me”. She contributed two further stories about Elizabeth, the central character in "Celia Behind Me", for an anthology (First Impressions, Oberon Press, 1980). Another in the same series was published in the annual Oberon Press collection Best Canadian Stories the following year. In 1980, the family moved to Ottawa (where her husband took a job in development communications) and she met with Oberon Press editors who decided to publish her entire eight-story sequence as The Elizabeth Stories (1984). The book received favorable reviews in newspapers and journals across the country, and Huggan, by now in her early 40s, began to be recognized as one of Canada’s “new writers”.

In 1987, the same year that Bob Huggan was sent to Kenya to work in communications at an international development agricultural research institute, Isabel Huggan saw her book published in Britain and the United States, where it was much acclaimed. The posting in Kenya lasted for three years and was followed by a three-year assignment to another development institute in France, and that led to a five-year stay at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Before leaving France in 1993, Isabel Huggan produced a second collection of short stories You Never Know, which established her international reputation as a writer.

Huggan began teaching creative writing in Belleville, and for several years taught for the University of Ottawa and the Ottawa High School Board. She continued to give writing workshops on return visits to Canada, and over several years taught for schools, universities and private writing groups in France, Switzerland, the Philippines, Australia and Hong Kong. In 1998 she joined the Humber School for Writers in Toronto as a staff writer, teaching at summer workshops and mentoring by correspondence, a position she continues to hold. The same year, Huggan and her husband settled in the south of France where they renovated an old stone house during their holidays away from the Philippines, and they remain there.

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