Sharon Butala

I've been writing for more than twenty years and have published eleven books, with two more out in 2002: my third short story collection, Real Life, and a collaboration with a photographer for a book on The Old Man On His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area, both with HarperCollins Canada. My third non-fiction book, Wild Stone Heart, (HarperCollins Canada, 2000) is now out in paperback.

In 1998 I received the Marian Engel Award for a Woman Writer in Mid-Career and in 2000 I was awarded an honorary LLD from the University of Regina. I've been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize — for Fever — and twice for the Governor General's Award, for both fiction and non-fiction, but won none of them.

I have wanted to make a record of the lives of the rural agricultural people of southwestern Saskatchewan, where I have lived more than twenty-five years, and to also explain why we need to stop rural depopulation while also conserving our grassland. In 1996 my husband and I turned our ranch over to The Nature Conservancy of Canada to establish the Old Man On His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area. The spiritual sustenance to be found in nature in its undisturbed state is one of my larger themes, but my overarching theme has been and continues to be my effort to understand and to lay bare, in both fiction and non-fiction, the female soul.

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© Ulrike L.