Kyo Maclear

Kyo Maclear is a Canadian essayist, novelist, and children’s author, born in London, England in 1970 to a British father, journalist and documentary filmmaker Michael Maclear, and a Japanese mother, artist and gallerist Yoko Maclear. She moved to Toronto at the age of four and later studied fine art and art history at the University of Toronto, completed a Master of Arts in cultural studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and earned a doctorate in environmental humanities at York University.

Her work spans adult fiction, nonfiction, and picture books and has been translated into more than fifteen languages and published in over twenty countries. Maclear’s novels include The Letter Opener (2007) and Stray Love (2012), and her nonfiction titles include Birds Art Life (2017), a Trillium Book Award winner, and Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets (2023), which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. She is also the author of numerous acclaimed children’s books, among them Spork (2010), as well as Virginia Wolf, Mr. Flux, The Specific Ocean, The Good Little Book, The Liszts, The Fog, Yak and Dove, Bloom, Story Boat, and The Big Bath House. Maclear lives and