About
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally and shortlisted for literary awards. Blaze Island (2020) was a Globe and Mail Best Book, also a Best Book of the Year from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and 49th Shelf. Accusation (2013) was one of NOW magazine’s Best Ten Books of 2013, an Amazon.ca Best Book and a Canada Reads Top 40 pick. Minus Time (1993), her first novel, was shortlisted for the Books in Canada/SmithBooks First Novel Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. Her second novel, The Rules of Engagement (2000) was a national bestseller and chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and one of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of the Year. Her third novel, Claire’s Head (2004), was shortlisted for Ontario’s Trillium Award and was a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year.
Bush’s fiction, praised for its intelligence and daring, often plumbs moral quandaries in which the public and private lives of its characters collide. In Blaze Island, a climate scientist, distraught at the worsening climate crisis, struggles to create a protected world for his daughter even as she contends with how to face a troubling future. Accusation follows a journalist’s search for truth amid disturbing allegations that arise in an Ethiopian children’s circus. Claire’s Head combines mystery and neurology in the story of two sisters linked by their intense experience of migraines. In The Rules of Engagement, a contemporary woman grapples with the psychological aftermath of a duel fought over her, and in Minus Time, the daughter of a Canadian astronaut confronts the strangeness of having a mother in space.
Bush’s nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications including the Globe and Mail, The New York Times Magazine, the literary magazines Brick and Canadian Notes & Queries, and the anthology, The Heart Does Break (2009). She has taught Creative Writing at Concordia University, in the low-residency MFA of the University of British Columbia, at the University of Florida, and for the Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Writer-in-Residence at universities including the University of Alberta, Guelph, McMaster, and the University of New Brunswick. Most recently she was a 2019 Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg/Institute of Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany. She has written and spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and divides her time between Toronto and the countryside of eastern Ontario.