Audrey Thomas Biography

Canadian-based novelist and short-story writer, born in Binghamton, New York, educated at Smith College and the University of British Columbia. From 1964 to 1966 she lived in Ghana, a source for some of her subsequent fiction, before settling in British Columbia. Her first collection of short stories was Ten Green Bottles (1967); others include Ladies and Escorts (1977), Real Mothers (1981), and Goodbye, Harold, Good Luck (1986). Her novels are essentially feminist in outlook, exploring the changing nature of male–female relationships in the contemporary world in post-modernist modes. In Mrs Blood (1970) the protagonist is the distraught victim of a miscarriage in Ghana. Songs My Mother Taught Me (1973) is about a girl's growing up in New York State. Blown Figures (1974) employs a collage technique to express the schizophrenia from which its heroine is suffering. Thomas's other novels include Latakia (1979), set in Greece and the Middle East, and Intertidal Life (1984), set on Galiano Island, the British Columbian Gulf island where Thomas herself had settled many years earlier. The Wild Blue Yonder (1990) is a further collection of short stories.