Heather Mallick

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Heather Mallick.

Heather Mallick (born 1959) is a Toronto-based liberal columnist, author and lecturer. She writes a weekly column for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website http://www.cbc.ca/. She teaches courses on politics and writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and lectures on Human Rights and Canadian nationalism. Until recently she also wrote a monthly column for Chatelaine magazine.

Raised in the northern Ontario town of Kapuskasing where her father was a medical doctor, Mallick attended the University of Toronto where she received a Master of Arts degree in English Literature. She also has undergraduate degrees in English Literature from U of T and in journalism from Ryerson University.

She was employed, after graduation, at the Canadian financial daily newspaper Financial Post where she first worked as a copy editor and later became a news editor.

She first came to public prominence in Canada during the 1990s as the book review editor and writer for the Sunday edition of the Toronto Sun, where she won two Canadian Newspaper Association National Newspaper Awards for critical writing in 1994 and feature writing in 1996^[1]. Mallick later wrote for The Globe and Mail where her politically left-of-centre opinion column was a regular part of the paper's Saturday edition until December 2005. She also wrote major and minor pieces for the newspaper on lifestyle and other issues. Stylistically, Mallick has been compared to writers such as the American commentators Maureen Dowd and Molly Ivins and the British commentator Julie Burchill.

Mallick's first book, Pearls in Vinegar, was published in September, 2004 in Canada. She published a collection of new essays for Knopf Canada in April, 2007 entitled Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life.

Mallick is married to Stephen Petherbridge, a senior British/Canadian journalist.^[2]

In October 2007, Mallick gave the 2nd annual Mel Hurtig Lecture on the Future of Canada, at the University of Alberta^[3].

[edit] Works

Pearls in Vinegar: The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick (2004) ISBN 978-0-670-04462-8. This is a collection of her short essays on many different subjects, personal, social and political, as a modern version of the 10th Century Japanese Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon.
Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life (2007) ISBN 978-0-676-97840-7. These essays are variously sad, angry and defiant pieces on the subject she calls "surviving the Bush era".