This page covers literary works in English (fiction, drama, and poetry) about or by authors from Ontario. This is by no means an extensive list, but rather a starting point for your research. Looking for a title or author not listed on this page - try using the search box below. If you cannot find a specific title, you can either request for UFV Library borrow it from another library or that the UFV Library purchases the item (see the corresponding links below).
You Can't Get There From Here: The Past as Present in Small-Town Ontario Fiction by 
Literary Images of Ontario by 
Gardens, Covenants, Exiles: Loyalism in the Literature of Upper Canada/Ontario by Here is a small selection of prairie authors (who either were born, lived a significant amount of time, or died in Ontario) in the UFV Library collections:
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Northrop Frye on Canada by 
The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood by 
Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art: Critical Essays by 
"A hilarious, surprising and poignant love story about the way families are invented, told with the savvy of a Zadie Smith and with an inventiveness all Ian Williams' own, Reproduction explores unconventional connections and brilliantly redefines family... Reproduction is a profoundly insightful exploration of the bizarre ways people become bonded that insists that family isn't a matter of blood." - Summary
"Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Years later, Dr. Simon Jordan--an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness--listens to Grace's story, from her family's difficult passage from Ireland to Canada, to her time as a maid in Thomas Kinnear's household. As Grace relives her past, Jordan draws her closer to a dark maze of relationships and her lost memories of the day her life was shattered. Superbly evoking a century past, and alive with mesmerizing storytelling, Alias Grace is vintage Atwood." - Summary
"Meet Bird and Mimi. The brilliant new novel from one of Canada's foremost authors. Inspired by a handful of old postcards, sent by Uncle Lenny nearly a hundred years before, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace the steps of Mimi's long-lost uncle and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe. By turns witty, sly and poignant, this is the unforgettable tale of one couple's holiday trip to Prague. The often grumpy Bird and optimistic Mimi and their wanderings through the European capitals reveal a complicated history, both personal and political."-- Provided by publisher.
"A collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate, and is set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron."
Epic in scope, exquisite in execution, Boyden's spellbinding third novel tells the story of the French conquest of Canada from the point of view of both the conquerors and the conquered.
"A teenager, scarred physically and emotionally after the murder of his younger brother, ends up in a group home, where he encounters a strange young boy who seems to be from another place and time."--Provided by publisher.
"Goldminer. Counterfeiter. Slave. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse. The colourful, fascinating characters that roam the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. With rich detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to the Yukon gold rush, antebellum Louisiana to a 1960s Toronto highway. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times." - Summary
"A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex." - Lawrence Hill website
"Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self-aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti-heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and “clippings,” astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then-little-known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General’s Awards and brazenly challenged the world’s notions of history and literature." - Amazon.ca
"Puncturing the bubble of Canadian smugness and naive assumptions of a post-racial nation, Cole chronicles just one year--2017--in the struggle against racism in this country. It was a year that saw calls for tighter borders when Black refugees braved frigid temperatures to cross into Manitoba from the States, Indigenous land and water protectors resisting the celebration of Canada's 150th birthday, police across the country rallying around an officer accused of murder, and more." - Description
"Over half a century ago, John Rowlands set out by canoe into the wilds of Maine to survey land for a timber company. After paddling alone for several days -- "it was so quiet I could hear the drops from the paddle hitting the water" -- he came upon "the lake of my boyhood dreams". He never left. He named the place Cache Lake because there was stored the best that the north had to offer -- timber for a cabin; fish, game and berries to live on; and the peace and contentment he felt he could not live without." - Summary
"Over the span of eleven years, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They were hundreds of kilometres away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no adequate high school on their reserves. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning author Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest Canada's long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities." - Summary
"The Letters of Stephen Leacock brings together over 800 letters, most of them never before published. Together they give a vivid picture of one of the twentieth century's most distinguished men of letters, a man who was honest, compassionate, and committed to his craft. From the brief, unpolished lines he wrote as a boy to his father, to the final letters he wrote before his death, Leacock's correspondence reveals much about the man behind the humour: the devoted son, husband, and father; the distinguished McGill professor; the proud Canadian; the generous uncle; the social critic; and the private citizen consumed and deeply troubled by the two world wars." - Summary
"Ken Haigh’s encounters open up spirited discussions in On Foot to Canterbury. Stories, texts, and histories enmesh: Haigh provides a history of the pilgrimage route, grapples with his spiritual questioning, and ponders the path that lies ahead for him. His peregrinations, physical and mental, widen readers' perspectives on things secular and sacred.”
"A unique retelling of WWII’s most dramatic escape, told through first-hand recollections of the soldiers who experienced it. On the night of March 24, 1944, 80 Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 336-foot-long tunnel and slipped into the forest beyond the wire of Stalag Luft III, a German POW compound near Sagan, Poland."
"In this follow-up to To Be Now: New and Selected, Windsor's first poet laureate turns his attention to the border stories of southwestern Ontario. Gervais writes about the flat open farm country outside of Windsor, but also about living and working in the shadow of Detroit. The table becomes the metaphor for all that takes place in a lifetime: a place for conversation, creativity, work, sustenance, deal-making, and relationships." - Description
"Ian Williams revisits the seemingly simple questions of grade school for inspiration: if Billy has five nickels and Jane has three dimes, how many Black men will be murdered by police? He finds no satisfaction, realizing that maybe there are no easy answers to ineffable questions. Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. " - Summary
"Psychic Unrest is full of the sea and rain, blues and golds, rhythm and revolution. This is Lillian Allen's long-anticipated book of poems — her first book since 1993. Collected here is a mix of poems, songs and poetic essays. Allen creates and examines a new poetic style, blending traditional poetry with her inimitable lyrical style, resulting in abstract poems with rhythmic movement that shout out to be read aloud." -Description
"This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay's best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay's afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process—its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis." - Description
"Cast during his year in the U of A's writer in residency, wild horses is Ottawan rob mclennan's deep lyrical engagement with Edmonton, Alberta. He sees the new terrain through his peculiar, sympathising lens--characterised by impassioned tones that range from brusque to tender. There is something of the magpie in him: nothing escapes his subtle gaze, his flighty wit, his voracious gleaning of experience. His supple lines meander and flit over scapes of love, home, family, and literature, rewarding the magpie-minded with a lucid estrangement to things both unfamiliar and familiar." - Description
""Each play adds up to a theatre experience which is so intriguing that we find ourselves going back through our memory of watching it."--from the introduction by Linda Moore Five plays by Daniel MacIvor in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of da da kamera. Includes: Never Swim Alone, The Soldier Dreams, You Are Here, In on It, and A Beautiful View." - Summary
"At the beginning of the 20th century in China, copies of Ibsen's A Doll House began circulating secretly amongst women in tea-houses. In China Doll , Marjorie Chan's first play, Ibsen is a catalyst for a young woman who comes to see her future in terms other than those laid out for her by the patriarchal society in which she lives. Su-Ling, an open-minded and intelligent young woman in Shanghai, has her feet bound by her grandmother, Poa-Poa. Despite the pain and the crippling effects, custom decrees that the smaller and daintier the foot, the more marriageable the woman. (The most desirable, "lotus feetâ" fit into lotus shoes only 3-4 inches long.) Poa-Poa has high hopes that her granddaughter will marry well and bring prosperity to them both. Then Su-Ling meets the merchant Li, who enlarges her world by teaching her to read. As Su-Ling grows into womanhood, she makes choices that lead her toward independence, and which have consequences for everyone in her world." - Summary
"In the aftermath of the 1989 Montreal Massacre, Benoît and Kathleen do everything they can to help their beloved son cope with his guilt and rage... but Jean's young life becomes unglued. Using humour and the humdrum of everyday life, Murphy intuitively moves backwards in time to the fateful day when Jean, the only ray of hope in this working-class family, escaped the massacre... or thought he did. This searing drama on courage, heroism, and despair explores the long private shadow that public violence casts. Winner of the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama and the 2008 CAA Carol Bolt Award." - Description
"From Governor General's Literary Award-winning playwright Djanet Sears comes a beautiful and deeply moving story set in present-day Negro Creek, a two-hundred-year-old black community in Western Ontario. Rainey Baldwin-Jackson, a country doctor, struggles to come to terms with the loss of her daughter, the disintegration of her marriage, and an eccentric elderly father on an astonishing crusade." - Description
"Slimm, a seventeen-year-old Black boy in a hoodie suddenly finds himself in the first moments of his afterlife. He calls out for God. God does not respond. What happens next is a sacred journey through the unknown, as Slimm grapples with the truth of the life he lived and the death he didn't choose. Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers is a protest for all Black life beyond headlines and hashtags, a prayer for all families left behind, and a promise to the community that all Black lives matter." - Description
"Fifteen-year-old Bess has no idea when she heads to London to see her Uncle Ted that she is about to find herself at the heart of a scandal involving sexual impropriety; her stepfather, Thom; and an attempted overthrow of the government. What does all this have to do with her? How adroitly can Bess manoeuvre through a series of interviews to avoid being swept up in the peril that might ensue? And will she be able to spin the facts to create a myth based on her own innocence?" - Description
You can use the following resources to find information on titles and authors from Ontario. Associations will likely also have news and updates that may feature interviews or prize winners.
