Susan Swan, C.M.

A novelist and an activist with international publications, Susan Swan's acclaimed feminist fiction has been published in eighteen countries and translated into eight languages.

Her work in progress, Bigger, A Memoir about Life with a Large Body, discusses the way her unusual height shaped her life and describes the three quests that Swan set out on in order to find a home that fit.

The memoir also tells the story of the giantess Anna Swan who exhibited with P.T. Barnum, and whose struggles with her size overshadowed Swan’s childhood. In order to exorcise that bogeywoman, Swan wrote her award winning first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World about Anna’s life, and this book is currently being made into a television series by producers who created the international, prize winning television series, Orphan Black.

Margaret Atwood and screenwriter and actor Susan Coyne are developing a pilot television series based on the part of Bigger that deals with the Seventies conceptual art scene and Swan’s early feminism.

In 2019, Swan published her eighth book of fiction, The Dead Celebrities Club, described in the Globe and Mail as "a tale of greed, hubris and fraud...a financial fable worthy of the age." Swan's 2012 novel, The Western Light, was a prequel to The Wives of Bath, her international bestseller made into the feature film Lost and Delirious, which premiered at Sundance and was shown in 32 countries. Her 2004 novel What Casanova Told Me was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2019, Swan won first prize for the Gloria Vanderbilt story contest for her story, The Oil Man’s Tale.

Swan was York' University’s Robarts Scholar for Canadian Studies in 1999-2000. As chair of The Writers' Union of Canada in 2008, she brought in a new benefits deal for writers.

Swan is the co-founder of The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, an annual award that debuts in 2023 and is open to Canadian and American women fiction writers.