Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels, (b at Toronto 1958) the daughter of a Jewish-Polish immigrant, grew up in Toronto, and earned a BA in Honours English at the University of Toronto. Michaels's first novel, FUGITIVE PIECES (1996), brought her national recognition and awards, including the Trillium Prize and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. The novel also garnered international acclaim, winning Britain's Orange Prize for Fiction and America's Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Robert FULFORD observed that Fugitive Pieces "attracted more international praise than any first novel by a serious writer in Canadian history." A film version of Fugitive Pieces, directed by Jeremy Podeswa, was produced in 2006.

Like Fugitive Pieces' protagonist Jakob Beer, Anne Michaels is also a poet. Her first collection, The Weight of Oranges, won the 1986 Commonwealth Prize for the Americas. Miner's Pond (1991) was short-listed for a GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD and won a Canadian Authors Association Award. Skin Divers was published in 1991. The poems from these three collections were published together, under the title Poems, in 2001.