Claire Cameron

Claire Cameron's first novel, The Line Painter, was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award for best crime first novel and won the Northern Lit Award from the Ontario Library Service. Cameron's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, and The Millions. She worked as a wilderness instructor in Ontario's Algonquin Park and for Outward Bound. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two children.

Her new novel, The Bear, is about a family who gets attacked by a black bear in Algonquin Park. The children survive, but their parents do not.

From Cameron's Q & A with Antonia Whyatt at Chatelaine:

Q: Have you ever had an encounter with a bear?

A: When I worked in Algonquin Park and then in Northern Ontario as a treeplanter, I did come across black bears from time to time. After that, I headed west and encountered my one and only grizzly bear. I was hiking alone in the Rockies, which isn’t recommended (I can’t justify it other than to say that I was 21). I turned around a bend in the trail and saw a grizzly in the distance. The bear seemed to know I was there. I backed up, climbed a tree and felt sorry for myself even though the whole thing was of my own making. When I finally climbed down, the bear was gone. And that is the climax of the story — nothing happened. This is a very typical bear story as bears usually keep their distance from humans. It is also why the bear attack in Algonquin Park, the one that I used as a starting point for writing The Bear, became so firmly lodged in my mind. It was...[read on]

Visit Claire Cameron's website, blog, and Facebook page.

Learn about Claire Cameron's five favorite stories about unlikely survivors.

My Book, The Movie: The Line Painter.

Writers Read: Claire Cameron.

--Marshal Zeringue