Paulette Jiles

Novelist, poet, and memoirist Paulette Jiles was born in Salem, Missouri, and raised in the Missouri Ozarks. She attended the University of Missouri where she earned a degree in Romance Languages. She moved to Canada when she was in her twenties to work as a journalist in the Canadian Arctic, and it was there that she won a Canadian Governor General Award (Canada’s highest literary honor) for her 1984 poetry collection, Celestial Navigation. In 2002 she won a Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for her novel Enemy Women. Simon the Fiddler is her most recent novel.