Merilyn Simonds

Merilyn Simonds (born 1949 in Winnipeg, Manitoba) is a Canadian writer.

Merilyn Simonds spent her childhood in Brazil, returning to Canada as a young teenager, where she was educated at the University of Western Ontario. She subsequently worked as a freelance writer and was an editor of Harrowsmith. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Simonds frequently published lifestyle and nature journalism for magazines such as Canadian Geographic,Saturday Night and Equinox.

In that time she wrote nine books of practical nonfiction, a children's book on water, and in 1991, co-wrote, with Merrily Weisbord, the book accompaniment to the controversial CBC Television documentary The Valour and the Horror.

In 1996, she published her first literary work, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the 1996 Governor General's Awards. The book is based on a cache of unique letters Simonds found in her attic, written in 1919 by an inmate of Kingston Penitentiary to a young woman who lived on the edge of the quarry where the prisoner did hard time. Simonds pieced together the story from the 79 letters, some written on toilet paper and scraps of calendar, and including four from the young women. The Convict Loverreproduces the letters interspersed with the story of incarceration inside Canada's most notorious prison and the struggle for human connection. Now considered a classic in Canadian creative nonfiction, The Convict Lover was chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 1996 by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire Magazine, Elm Street Magazine and Maclean’s. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese, and German, and in 1997, was adapted for the stage by the Kingston Summer Theatre Festival, premiering at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in the fall of 1998.

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