Anne Michaels is a major figure in contemporary Canadian literature. Toronto-based, she began her literary career as a poet but attained extensive international recognition with the publication of her first – and to date only – novel, Fugitive Pieces.
She was born in Toronto in 1958, the youngest of four children, with three older brothers. She grew up with a profound sense of the effect of the Second World War on the city’s immigrant population. Her father came from a Polish-Jewish family and left the Polish-Russian border in 1931 at the age of 13 to settle in Canada. He ran a music shop in Toronto while Michaels was growing up. Michaels studied English at the University of Toronto and went on to …
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