Alison MacLeod was born in Montreal, Canada, the fourth of five children.  Months later, the family moved to Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.  Her earliest memories are of crab-apple blossom in the backyard; her flower-power pant suit; her sister on the bagpipes; Motown on the radio; hippies in the park behind her house; and the reassuring, if sickly, smell of books in the public library on Saturday afternoons. Eight years later, the family would return to Montreal and then, to Nova Scotia, the home province of her parents, and the place where both sides of the family had lived for generations. 

Her first real understanding of literature’s beautiful grip came at the age of 14 when she was given a battered copy of Jane Eyre.  It was the first experience she had of the visceral pleasure of reading; where she felt she had been physically plunged into someone else’s world.  At the same time, she and her sister were fascinated by late-night B-movies with time-travel themes.  They offered her her first cheap glimpses of worlds in which reality and time were both fickle and provocative.

At university, MacLeod studied English literature and temporarily gave up on her own sporadic attempts to write.  Self-consciousness had set in.  It was only after university, while working nights as an usher at a theatre Halifax, and mingling with young set designers, actors and stage managers, that she realised it was possible – difficult but possible – to become someone who made things; someone who trusted her imagination enough to see where it would take her.

In 1987, it took her to England to take up a place on the University of Lancaster’s MA in Creative Writing.  In that year, her first short story was published. She was paid £10.  It stretched to an acidic bottle of wine, a celebration pizza, and the virgin thrill of seeing her work in print.  She continued to write and publish short fiction.  In 1990, she started teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Chichester, where she lectures today.  In 1996, her first novel, The Changeling, was published in the U.K. and U.S.  In 2005, The Wave Theory of Angels was published by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books in Canada.  Her short story collection, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction, will be released in September 2007 by Hamish Hamilton. 

In her work, MacLeod is interested, perhaps above all, in the transformative force of the imagination in our so-called ordinary lives.  She is also drawn to images and principles of high-energy; to stories of the unpredictable forces of love, sex, conception and death in our lives.  She cannot say why exactly.

She suspects it is better if she remains unsure. She puts a kind of faith in Keats’ idea of ‘negative capability’, that is, when a person ‘…is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. She tries to remain capable. 

She lives in Brighton and returns often to Canada to see family.