Linda Spalding

Linda Spalding is a Canadian-American author and editor born in Topeka, Kansas, who has lived in Canada for most of her adult life. She is the co-founder and editor of Brick: A Literary Journal, one of Canada's most respected literary magazines. Her novel The Purchase (2012) won the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction. The Purchase is a sweeping historical novel set in early nineteenth-century Virginia, exploring questions of slavery, religion, and moral compromise through the story of a Quaker farmer who inadvertently becomes a slaveholder. The novel draws on extensive historical research and traces the consequences of that original moral failure across generations. Spalding has also written The Follow (1998), a non-fiction account of following in the footsteps of Alfred Russel Wallace in Borneo, and Who Named the Knife (2007), a true crime narrative. She has been a significant presence in Canadian letters both as a writer and through her editorial work at Brick.