| Marianne Ackerman | |
|---|---|
| Born | Belleville, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Genres | Fiction, Drama, Journalism |
| Notable work(s) | Piers' Desire |
Marianne Letitia Ackerman (born 1952) is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and journalist. Piers' Desire, her third and most recent novel, was published in 2010.
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Marianne Ackerman was born in 1952 in Belleville, Ontario and grew up on a farm in Prince Edward County.[1] She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (Honours) from Carleton University in 1976. She spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris studying French language and culture before receiving a Master of Arts in Drama from the University of Toronto in 1981.
From the early 1980s, Ackerman lived in Montreal, where she worked as a freelance journalist and as theatre critic for the Montreal Gazette, winning the Nathan Cohen Award for theatre criticism.
In the late eighties, she founded a bilingual theatre company, Theatre 1774, which staged her plays L'Affaire Tartuffe, Woman by a Window, Céleste and Blue Valentine as well as her adaptations of August Strindberg's Miss Julie and William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. The company also staged The Echo Project, a play developed by Robert Lepage from Anne Diamond's book of poetry, A Nun's Story and Ackerman worked with Lepage on Alienouidet, a play about the actor Edmund Kean in Canada. Ackerman subsequently wrote another play about Edmund Kean, called Venus of Dublin, which was staged at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal in 2000.
Ackerman lived near Avignon, France, for six years, from 1998 to 2004, before moving back to Montreal.[2] Her freelance articles, essays, reviews and criticism have appeared in The Walrus, The Montreal Gazette, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Theatre Review, The Guardian Weekly, En Route Magazine and other publications. She has taught courses in playwrighting and the history of Quebec theatre at McGill University.
Ackerman currently lives in Montreal, where she publishes the online arts journal The Rover (roverarts.com).[2] She is married to Gwyn Campbell, a professor of economic history at McGill University, and has a daughter, Fiona, who is an artist.[1]