Billie Livingston

Billie Livingston writes Canadian fiction across genres, including essays, short stories, and poetry that carefully study family loyalty under economic and emotional strain. Going Down Swinging, published by Vintage Canada in 2000, was her first novel. It follows two years in the lives of Eilleen Hoffman and her daughters, Grace and Charlotte, moving between the mother's attempts to hold the household together and Grace's experience of their instability. The alternating viewpoints let affection, poverty, dependency, and social intervention appear without a single easy judgment. Livingston later wrote Cease to Blush and One Good Hustle, while her collection Greedy Little Eyes received the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and a CBC Bookie Award. She worked in poetry, and a story connected with her book for younger readers, The Trouble with Marlene, was adapted for film.