Linda Leith


Linda Leith is a Montreal-based writer, editor, and publisher.
Leith was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and first moved to Montreal with her family in 1963. She studied in Paris and London and later spent two years in Budapest, Hungary. She taught in the Department of English at John Abbott College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec. Leith spent fourteen years as president and artistic director of Blue Metropolis, the first multilingual literary festival in the world. For her achievement she was awarded the Quebec Writers' Federation Community Award in 2003 and Canada's Commissioner of Official Languages' first Award of Excellence – Promotion of Linguistic Duality, in 2009. She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her "contribution to Canada" in 2012.
In 2010, Leith left Blue Metropolis. In 2011, she founded a publishing company, , and the online magazine Salon.ll.
Leith is the author of the literary history Writing in the Time of Nationalism, which The Globe and Mail called "a very fine book," "written in clear, exhilarating prose," and the memoir Marrying Hungary, as well as a study of Hugh MacLennan's novel Two Solitudes. She has also published three novels: Birds of Passage, The Tragedy Queen, and The Desert Lake.

Novels