Kyo Maclear

My guest on this episode is Kyo Maclear. Kyo is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and children's author. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages and published in over twenty-five countries, and have garnered nominations from the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the National Magazine Awards. Her most recent book is Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets, published by Knopf Canada in 2023. That book won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. The Washington Post called Unearthing “a moving account of a daughter’s struggle to know her mother before she loses her.”

 

Kyo and I talk about her tendency, as a writer and as a person, to seek out beauty and optimism, about starting to write a memoir even as the events it depicts are still happening, and about how the publication of Unearthing has allowed her to stop seeking to resolve some of the family secrets it explores.  

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.