Fragile Fern – Cystopteris fragilis

Linda Spalding (née Dickinson; June 25, 1943) is a Canadian writer and editor. Born in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Jacob Alan Dickinson and Edith Senner, she lived in Mexico and Hawaii before moving to Toronto, Ontario in 1982.^[1]

She has two daughters, Esta and Kristin Spalding, from her first marriage to photographer Philip Spalding. Spalding later married Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje; Linda, Esta and Michael are also on the editorial board of the national literary magazine, Brick.^[2]

Spalding's work has been honoured numerous times; her non-fiction work, The Follow, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize. She has since received the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the Canadian literary community^[3] and, in 2012, the Governor-General's Literary Award for her novel, The Purchase.^[4]

Spalding has worked as a professor of English and writing at the University of Hawaii, York University, the University of Guelph, Brown University (where she was writer-in-residence in 1991), the University of Toronto and Ryerson University. She has also taught creative writing at Humber College's School for Writers.^[1] Prior to this, she has worked as a manager for Hawaii Public Television and as the director of a child care services agency in Kailua, Hawaii.

• Daughters of Captain Cook (1987)
• The Paper Wife (1994)
• The Follow / A Dark Place in the Jungle: Following Leakey's Last Angel into Borneo (1999)
• Riska (1999)
• The Brick Reader (1999) (edited with Michael Ondaatje)
• Lost Classics (2000, Knopf Canada; ISBN 0-676-97299-3) (edited with Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Michael Ondaatje)
• Mere (2001, HarperFlamingo Canada; ISBN 0-00-225538-3) (with Esta Spalding)
• Who Named The Knife (2005)
• The Purchase (2012)
• A Reckoning (2017)