BIOGRAPHY

SHORT BIO:

Alison Wearing is a bestselling, award-winning author, playwright, and performer. Her writing has won the National Magazine Awards’ Gold Medal, been nominated for the RBC Taylor Prize for Nonfiction, shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction, and her books have become national bestsellers. Alison’s numerous theatre awards include Best Dramatic Script at New York City’s United Solo, the largest solo theatre festival in the world. She is also the creator/facilitator of Memoir Writing Ink, a popular online program that has guided thousands of people through the process of transforming personal stories into memoir, and the founder of the International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir. Alison offers writing retreats in Canada, Europe and online, and otherwise devotes herself to yoga, laughter, and dancing at every opportunity.

DETAILED BIOGRAPHY:

Alison was born and raised in Peterborough, Ontario—a lovely city, although not necessarily the best place to be in the 1980s with a gay father. She bolted out of town (and country) at the age of seventeen and spent the next twelve years studying, living and travelling throughout Europe, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, the Amazonian regions of Ecuador and Peru, and across Siberia and Mongolia to China.

Her early articles and essays reported from Václav Havel’s first parliament following Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. The experience also inspired her first short story, Notes From Under Water, which was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology: The Best of Canada’s New Writing. Subsequent travels in then-Yugoslavia during the Balkan War resulted in the longform essay Staring Down the Beast, awarded that year’s Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Travel Writing. Solitary Motion, a meditation on travels in north-western China, won the Western Canada Magazine Award 1st Prize, also for Travel Writing.

Alison's first book was the internationally acclaimed travel memoir, Honeymoon in Purdah (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000), her account of a journey through Iran. The Calgary Sun called it "the perfect travel memoir" and the Ottawa Citizen described it as "one of the best pieces of travel writing it has been my privilege to read in this, or any, millennium." The book was published in seven countries.

After moving to central Mexico in 2002, Alison shifted her focus to the performing arts, singing, recording and touring with world/folk musicians, and later studying dance and choreography. Together with Shakespearean actor/director Stuart Cox, she created Giving Into Light, a one-woman show combining literary chronicles with music and dance. The show toured across North America from 2009-2012 and won numerous Fringe Festival awards.

Her more recent work, Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter, is both a memoir (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2013) and a one-woman show directed by Stuart Cox and Catherine Hume. Confessions tells the story of growing up with a gay father in a small town in the 1980s. The memoir was nominated for the RBC/Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction, named one of the Top 50 Books of 2013 by Indigo Books, and it became a national bestseller.

Alison has done more than 100 performances of the Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter show in theatres across the country, off-Broadway, and in international literary and theatre festivals. The show has garnered top honours in virtually every festival in which it has appeared, including four Canadian Fringe Festival ‘Best of Fest’ awards, Best Drama, Patrons' Pick, Critics' Choice Finalist, CBC's Outstanding Solo Show Award, and Best Dramatic Script at New York City's United Solo, the largest festival of solo theatre in the world.

Her third book, Moments of Glad Grace, was published in the spring of 2020. Recommended as one of Maclean’s magazine’s 19 Books You Must Read This Summer, “highly recommended” by the Vancouver Sun, called “an endearing delight” by Shelf Awareness and “a well-cut diamond” by the Ormsby Review, the book has also been described as “a wise, funny, and tender book, beautifully written and perfectly executed from first to last sentence” by Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi.

Alison has served as a juror for the Governor-General's Literary Awards, a reader for the CBC Literary Awards, a mentor for the University of Guelph's MFA Creative Writing program, a faculty member of the Under The Volcano masterclass program, and Writer-in-Residence at Trent University, the University of Guelph, and Green College, a graduate college of interdisciplinary scholarship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She has since been appointed a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Green College/UBC.

In 2020, Alison took her years of experience as a memoir writing coach and created Memoir Writing Ink, an online writing program that guides people through the process of transforming personal stories into memoir. She also administers the International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir and leads writing retreats in Italy and Canada.

In her spare time, Alison devotes herself to laughter, colour, and dancing at every opportunity.