Mary Burns

Works by Mary Burns:

• Shinny's Girls the Trilogy
• Center/Centre
• The Private Eye: Observing Snow Geese
• The Reason for Time
• Flashing Yellow: A Novel
• You Again

Mary Burns was born near Chicago, the fourth of eleven children. She began working as a journalist shortly after emigrating to Canada in 1970.

In addition to her newspaper job, she wrote features for newspaper syndicates and acted as a stringer for TIME magazine on the Berger Inquiry. Her first novel was Suburbs of the Arctic Circle. She worked in Vancouver as a freelancer supporting a daughter, and made documentary films mostly for the National Film Board of Canada. She wrote for various environmental consultants. She taught at Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing program, random workshops and short fiction at the Festival of the Written Arts in Sechelt. As Chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College, she taught fiction, playwriting and personal narrative classes until 2008. She lives in Grantham’s Landing, near Gibsons, B.C. continuing to write novels and plays. She's a member of PEN Canada, and the Playwrights Guild of Canada, also the Playwright's Theatre Centre, Vancouver.