Amanda Leduc’s novel, Wild Life, has been longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.

Amanda is a disabled writer whose most recent novel, The Centaur’s Wife, is “an exquisite magical world, perfectly rendered, for [a] dark and wonderful story about the dream life of outsiders and the disabled” (Heather O’Neill). Her non-fiction book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space was nominated for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. Her essays and stories have appeared in Canada, U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and she speaks regularly across North America on accessibility and the role of disability in storytelling. Amanda holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of St. Andrews. She has cerebral palsy and presently makes her home in Hamilton, Ontario, where she lives with a very lovable dog named Sitka, who once ate and peed on a manuscript. (Everyone’s a critic, it seems.)

What’s the first piece of writing you had published?

When I was sixteen, I had a short story called Slaying Dragons published in a 1998 issue of In2Print, a wonderful Canadian magazine dedicated to publishing the work of writers under the age of eighteen. In2Print closed down a few years after this, but I still think about that magazine and miss it, even all these years later. When I think of it, I always give thanks to Jean Baird, who worked so hard to bring In2Print to Canada’s next generation of young writers.

Which authors or books inspired your book?

Wild Life began as a short story, itself inspired by a short story called The Debutante, by the English-Mexican surrealist author Leonora Carrington. In Carrington’s short story, a young woman conspires with a hyena to avoid a ball by having the hyena take her place. I was fascinated by the matter-of-fact way Carrington describes the hyena in her story, and after reading it began to wonder what a hyena might look and act like if I wrote one into a story of mine. Almost immediately, a picture came to mind of two married hyenas who lived in an apartment above a young woman. The journey of figuring out why the hyenas lived above her, and how they came to be, led to that initial short story of mine, and gradually—as the story refused to go away and hinted at a much larger world—to the novel.

What advice would you have for someone struggling to make time to write?

I think it’s important, first and foremost, to remember that writing involves just as much thinking as it does getting words out. I am writing even when I’m not getting words down on the page because I’m always looking at the world and asking questions of it, trying to look at things from different angles. I’m constantly fascinated by what the writer Bill Gaston calls “artful incongruity”—the way that life can so often throw up interesting juxtapositions and strange happenings for us to marvel at. My brain is always looking at these moments of marvel and considering them in the light of narrative, turning from the world to the page and back again. So if you’re thinking about your stories and your characters and wondering about them, try not to feel guilty if you’re struggling to meet that word count—you are writing even if you’re not putting words on the page.

When you acknowledge this state of being in perpetual fascination and love (and grief) with the world, I think eventually the words build up inside of you until you have no choice but to get them out in some way. When I’m struggling for writing time, I find it helpful to block off a regular, recurring bit of time where I’m allowed to just sit in front of my computer or my notebook and write down whatever comes to mind. That window can be three hours or fifteen minutes. What’s important to me is that I allow space for the words that have been brewing in my mind to come forward and out in whatever way they need to. So they might come out in that three-hour window, or maybe they trickle out—the Notes app in my phone is especially helpful in those moments when I can’t sit at my computer but need to capture a phrase or a word or a thought. One thought after another is eventually a book, no matter how long it might take to bring it all together.

So, in a nutshell; recognize that everything you think and do can contribute to, and be a part of, the writing process, and then block off small bits of time wherever you can to allow whatever words have built up inside of you to make their way out onto the page. (Also? Make friends with the Notes app on your phone!)

What’s the last great book you read by a Canadian author?

I loved And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott, for all the ways that it plays with time and space and reality and really invites the reader to reconsider how they conceive of the world. It also features a talking cockroach—how can you not love a book like that?

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Very early! My mother likes to talk about me crawling into my grandmother’s lap at three years old and rattling off a story for her. When I was in kindergarten and first grade, I would write stories in class and my teachers would help me put them together into little “books”, complete with construction paper covers and accompanying illustrations. My parents got me a keepsake journal for my time in school and when I filled out the grade one title page, I wrote “author” as the answer to what I wanted to be when I grew up.

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