Portrait of Catherine Bush

Graphite on acid-free paper 12” x 9”,   dessin 30.48 x 22.86 cm

This drawing is based on a photograph by Arden Wray.

Catherine Bush Catherine Bush is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, including the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement (2000) and themed Blaze Island (2020). , a climate-change-themed novel set on a fictional version of Fogo Island off the coast of Newfoundland featuring a climate scientist, desperate to respond to melting ice, and his daughter who is trying to create a new world for herself. Blaze Island was a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and was chosen as the Hamilton Reads pick for 2021.

Catherine has long brought ecological concerns to her work: from her first novel, Minus Time, in which the daughter of a female astronaut tumbles into the orbit of a group of young animal-rights-turned-environmental-activists intent on saving life on Earth. She has published ecologically themed essays in such publications as Emergence and Noema, also essays that address the challenges of writing fiction in response to the climate crisis in Canadian Notes and Queries(republished in Best Canadian Essays 2021) and The Dalhousie Review. Her nonfiction has appeared widely in such publications as the Toronto Star, theGlobe and Mail and the New York Times. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, where she teaches an undergraduate workshop called Writing Nature, is an affiliate of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research, and is the faculty lead on their Imagining Climates online research project. She has created a provincially accessible online unit for undergraduates in Ontario on writing in response to the climate crisis. She continues to write climate-change responsive fiction and address the pedagogical challenges of bringing the climate crisis to the classroom, particularly the writing classroom.

Catherine Bush est l’auteur de cinq romans, dont Blaze Island (2020), qui traite du climat. Elle a écrit et s’est exprimée au niveau international sur la manière d’aborder la crise climatique dans la fiction et intègre les questions climatiques dans sa pédagogie de l’écriture créative. Elle est professeur associé de création littéraire à l’université de Guelph et membre affilié de l’Institut de recherche environnementale de Guelph.

Catherine Bush est l’auteur de cinq romans, dont Blaze Island (2020), qui traite du climat. Elle a écrit et s’est exprimée au niveau international sur la manière d’aborder la crise climatique dans la fiction et intègre les questions climatiques dans sa pédagogie de l’écriture créative. Elle est professeur associé de création littéraire à l’université de Guelph et membre affilié de l’Institut de recherche environnementale de Guelph.