Ami McKay

Scots Bay, on the Nova Scotia shore of the Bay of Fundy, gave Ami McKay the material for her first novel. A house she moved into in 2000 had belonged to a midwife, and the stories attached to it became The Birth House (2006), a Canadian bestseller that took a Libris Award for fiction. Born in Indiana in 1968, McKay trained in music education and musicology at Indiana State University and taught in Chicago before leaving for Canada, where she also made radio documentaries for CBC. The Virgin Cure (2011) draws on a great-great-grandmother who practised medicine among the poor of New York's Lower East Side in the 1870s. Half Spent Was the Night (2018) is a short midwinter tale that returns to the three women of The Witches of New York. Her memoir Daughter of Family G (2019) sets out her family's long documented history of Lynch syndrome, an inherited cancer risk, and won the Evelyn Richardson award for non-fiction.