Martha
Baillie
Martha Baillie is the author of six novels and two nonfiction books. Her novel The Incident Report was longlisted for the Giller Prize and made into a feature film. Co-written with her late sister Christina Baillie, Sister Language was a 2020 Trillium Book Award finalist. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel was an Oprah Editors’ Pick and named as one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire. Her nonfiction can be found in Brick: A Literary Journal and her poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review. Baillie works part-time at Toronto Public Library and lives in Toronto.
Videos
There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie
Award History
Jury Citation
“In this exquisitely written memoir, Baillie delves into the fine despair coating family relationships, calling into question how clearly we see those we live most closely to. Through the art of the essay, she explores her mother’s passing, her father’s protective role, and the long-term consequences of living with a sister who has schizophrenia. Here are the age-old challenges of loving someone who doesn’t understand us, the doomed attempts to save someone from themselves, and the constant reckoning with the millions of ways family imprints itself on us. An elegy to the beautiful fight to keep a family together and an ode to the devastating loss when things fall apart, There Is No Blue rattles the bones of what it is to be in imperfect relationships with the people we are tied to by birth and blood.”—2024 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction jury (Annahid Dashtgard, Taylor Lambert and Christina Sharpe)
