Alistair MacLeod

Alistair MacLeod, OC FRSC was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and academic. His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Islands rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present. MacLeod has been praised for his verbal precision, his lyric intensity and his use of simple, direct language that seems rooted in an oral tradition.

MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. His parents, whose first language was Gaelic, had migrated to Saskatchewan from Cape Breton to homestead during the Great Depression. The family moved on to Edmonton when MacLeod was five and then to the town of Mercoal, Alberta where his father worked in a coal mine. However, the MacLeods suffered from homesickness and when Alistair was 10, they returned to Cape Breton and the farmhouse in Dunvegan, Inverness County that his greatgrandfather had built in the 1860s.

Source: Wikipedia