Gowdy, Barbara, 1950- : Barbara Gowdy was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950 and raised in Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto. She studied theatre arts and film at York University and worked as an editor and managing editor for a publishing firm, Lester & Orpen Dennys, from 1974 until 1979, after which she worked as a freelance editor. Her first marriage was to a fellow student, William Purchase, and her first book, an anthology titled The Rabbit and the Hare, was published in 1982 under her married name, Barbara Purchase, with John Wiley & Sons in Toronto and with Van Nostrand Reinhold in the United States.
Periodically during the 1980's and 1990's, Gowdy taught creative writing at Ryerson and the University of Toronto. As well, she worked as an interviewer on the TVOntario programme Imprint which dealt with contemporary writing.
After her second marriage, to Mark Howells, Gowdy reverted to her maiden name when she published her first novel, a historical work set in Great Britain, in 1988. Through the Green Valley was published in Canada by General Publishing, in Britain by Judy Piatkus Books and in the United States by St. Martin's Press, but it did not attract a great deal of attention. However, with the appearance of her next novel, Falling Angels, the following year, Gowdy became an international success. The novel, a dark comedy introducing what would become Gowdy's continuing preoccupation with misfits and the abnormal, was published in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, the Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Turkey. An excerpt published as a short story, Disneyland, was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1989 edition of The Best American Stories.
Gowdy's next book was a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, We So Seldom Look on Love (1992), whose title story about necrophilia was filmed as Kissed, a feature directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Her next novel, Mister Sandman (1995), another black comedy, was short-listed for the Giller and Trillium Prizes and the Governor General's Award. Her imaginative novel about elephants, The White Bone (1998), was also short-listed for the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award, as well as the Rogers Writer's Trust Fiction Prize. It was published in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Colombia, Brazil and Japan.
Gowdy's unique voice in Canadian literature led to an invitation to appear at one of the TED conferences organized by Richard Saul Wurman, TEDCity, held in Toronto in 2000. In 2002, she served as a juror for the prestigious Giller Prize. Gowdy's fifth novel, The Romantic, was published in 2003 and became a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writer's Trust Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book. Gowdy's sixth novel Helpless was published in 2007 and won the Trillium Book Award.
Gowdy was named a member of the Order of Canada in October 2006.
