PATRICIA ROBERTSON was born near Manchester in England. She arrived in Canada when she was nine, along with her parents and two younger brothers. She grew up in northern B.C., where she first lived in a house with a wood stove right next to the bush, with bears scrounging in the garbage cans! Patricia has been writing for as long as she can remember. She published her first poem when she was 10, in an American magazine.

Patricia completed an Honours English degree at Simon Fraser University, then travelled through Europe. She lived in Spain for three years, teaching English as a second language in the Canary Islands and working as a bilingual secretary in Madrid. Afterwards she lived in Vancouver for a number of years, working as a writer and editor. She has also worked as a waitress, bar hostess, and in a literary agency, among other jobs.

A serious car accident made her realize she wasn't immortal, and she decided to go back to school to study creative writing. She completed her M.A. at Boston University and then returned to Vancouver, where she taught at the University of B.C. and the Capilano College Continuing Education departments. In 1990 she moved to Whitehorse, Yukon, for four months to be the writer-in-residence at Yukon Public Libraries. She stayed to teach creative writing at Yukon College—the first creative writing courses offered there—and today still lives and writes in Whitehorse. She shares her home with her partner, a journalist and poet, and their golden lab/husky cross, Freya (who has a role in a young-adult novel that Patricia is writing called The Fires of Terrania).

Patricia's first collection of short fiction, City of Orphans, was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Two of the stories in her second collection, The Goldfish Dancer: Stories and Novellas, were nominated for National Magazine Awards, and one of these stories was also selected for the Journey Prize Anthology. Her work has also been nominated for the CBC Literary Awards and the Pushcart Prize. Her stories reflect her vision of the world as a globalized, hybrid place where the past continues to influence the present. Themes of exile, language, and dislocation all appear in her fiction, which often mixes the real with the slightly magical and fantastical.

Patricia's poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines. Her five-part radio play, Marjorie's War, was broadcast on CBC Radio, and she has recently completed a feature-length screenplay.