MacLeod, Alistair

▪ 2002

      For his long-awaited first novel, No Great Mischief (2000), Canadian author Alistair MacLeod won the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; a superbly crafted work, the book chronicled the lives of several generations of Scottish immigrants on Cape Breton Island in northeastern Nova Scotia. MacLeod, a meticulous stylist who wrote No Great Mischief over the course of 13 years, was the first Canadian writer to receive the $172,000 award, the world's richest literary prize for fiction. Until the award was announced, MacLeod was largely unknown outside his native country, despite his having earlier published two critically acclaimed short-story collections. Fellow Canadian author Michael Ondaatje once called him “one of the great undiscovered writers of our time.” Following the publication of No Great Mischief, the Toronto Globe and Mail went farther, describing MacLeod as “the greatest living Canadian writer.”

      MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Sask., on July 20, 1936. His parents were natives of Cape Breton, and when MacLeod was 10 years old, he returned with his family to the island. He worked as a miner and logger before earning a teacher's certificate from Nova Scotia Teachers College. He went on to obtain his B.A. and B.Ed. from St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, N.S., in 1960, his M.A. from the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, in 1961, and his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 1968. He taught at Indiana University at Fort Wayne from 1966 to 1969, then returned to Canada as a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Windsor, Ont. For many years MacLeod also taught writing at the Banff (Alta.) Centre for Continuing Education. He was named professor emeritus at the University of Windsor in 2000.

      MacLeod's writing career began in 1968 with the publication of his short story “The Boat,” which was included in the 1969 anthology The Best American Short Stories. Many critics acknowledged him as a master of the short-story form after the appearance of his first collection, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, in 1976, and a second volume of stories, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), further solidified his reputation. MacLeod's fiction dwelled mostly on the working people of Cape Breton—miners, loggers, fishermen, and small farmers—and sensitively explored family relationships as well as examining the relationship of the islanders to their Celtic past.

      MacLeod's literary oeuvre was notable for its smallness. Together, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun included only 16 stories, and each book took some 10 years to write. His lean output might be explained by his admitted perfectionism; MacLeod revised constantly and read each of his sentences aloud in his belief that “the ear is a good editor.” In part to satisfy the growing numbers of admirers of his work, he followed up No Great Mischief with Island (2000), which collected all of his previously published stories and included one new one.

Sherman Hollar

* * *