Catherine Bush is the author of five novels and Skin (Goose Lane Editions, 2025), a collection of stories. Blaze Island (Goose Lane Editions, 2020) was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2020 and the Hamilton Reads 2021 selection. Accusation (GLE, 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 (HarperCollins, 1993), her first novel, was shortlisted for the Books in Canada/SmithBooks First Novel Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. The Rules of Engagement (HarperCollins, 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. Claire’s Head (McClelland & Stewart, 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. Her compelling narratives explore intersections of realism and the speculative while bringing ecological concerns, relations between human and more-than-human, and the languages of science to literature. Bush was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and a 2019 Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, also in Germany. She has written and spoken internationally about responding to the climate crisis through fiction.
Bush’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Noema, Emergence, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times Magazine, and in anthologies including Devouring Tomorrow (2025) and Best Canadian Essays 2021. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she has previously taught at Concordia University and the University of Florida, been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and 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. She lives in Toronto and a stone schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.
