Alistair MacLeod

Colin Nicholson (University of Edinburgh)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

Born 20 Jul 1936
Died 20 Apr 2014
Activity c. 1956-c. 2014

Places

Born in Canada
Active in Canada

Activities

Primary

Story-writer

Resources

Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1936 and was four years old when his parents moved to Alberta where his father worked as a miner. By the age of ten he was living on a farm on Cape Breton Island to which his family had returned, and there MacLeod grew up as one of the first generation of Nova Scotians not to be Gaelic speaking. After first training as a schoolteacher he enrolled at Francis Xavier University in 1957, graduating three years later with a B.A. and B.Ed., and financing his education by working at different times as a logger, miner and fisherman. Five of his uncles were also mineworkers. In 1961 he received an M.A. from the University of New Brunswick and in 1968, the year his first (and p…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1601 words

Citation: Nicholson, Colin. "Alistair MacLeod". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 November 2001; last revised 06 November 2018. [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2866, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here