Born in the UK and raised in northern British Columbia, Patricia Robertson has lived in Spain, London, Yukon, and elsewhere. Her third fiction collection, Hour of the Crab, was released this spring to rave reviews. Her first collection, City of Orphans, was shortlisted for B.C.’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her fiction and essays have been nominated for the CBC Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, and three National Magazine Awards, and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. In 2018 she was the winner of the International Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in Poetry (UK). She has served as writer-in-residence at libraries and universities across Canada, and currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg.

Robertson’s new collection has been described as “electrifying,” “unsettling,” “uncanny,” made up of “worlds brimming with character, emotion and revelation.” David Huebert says: “Deftly speculative, menacingly real, these stories compel you to change your life.” Wayne Grady says, “Her stories re-align what we think we know about the world—they are that good.” Robertson herself prefers the term “heightened realism” and says that she writes fiction with one foot firmly in this world and the other somewhere else.