Alistair MacLeod

Alistair MacLeod (1936-2014) was born and raised in North Battleford, Saskatchewan and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He was the author of three collections of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, and Island, which collected in a single volume one new story and all of his previously published short stories.

His first book of fiction, No Great Mischief, about a family emigrating from Scotland in 1779, was met with great critical acclaim.

A specialist in British literature of the nineteenth century, MacLeod was a professor of English and Creative Writing at Windsor University. He and his family returned every summer to Cape Breton where he spent part of his time, “writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island.”