Candace Savage


Candace Sherk Savage is a Canadian non-fiction writer.

Early life

Candace Sherk was born in the Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada on December 2, 1949. Both of her grandmothers were born in the United States and married Canadian men. As her father was a school administrator, she moved throughout Alberta during her childhood.

Career

Savage began her journalism career as a news editor of Sun Color Press and later became an editorial assistant for Co-Operative Consumer. In the 1970s, Savage became a free-lance book editor with The Western Producer in Saskatoon, which piqued her interest in authoring books. In the 1970s, Savage moved to Saskatoon with her husband Arthur Savage. In 1977, she began to construct a biography on Nellie McClung. After her husband died, Savage moved to Edmonton and Yellowknife before returning to Saskatoon with her daughter. From 1984 until 1986, she was the coordinator of information and education at the Science Institute of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.
In the 1990s, she received the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award for her book "Bird Brains," and the Science in Society Book Award from the Canadian Science Writers’ Association for her book "Aurora and Bird Brains." In 2002, her book "Wizards" won the 2002 Saskatchewan Book Award.
In 2010, Savage was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Two years later, Savage wrote a A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape, which she called a personal memoir of her growing interest in the natural and human history of southwestern Saskatchewan. The book won the 2012 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. In 2019, while renovating her 1920s-era bungalow in Saskatoon, she discovered paraphernalia belonging to Ralph Blondin. This led her to research how Blondin's family, a Métis French-speaking family, dealt with White Supremacy and assimilated to survive. She eventually published her discoveries in a book titled "Strangers in the House."

Selected works