Amanda Leduc

Leduc's first novel, The Miracles of Ordinary Men, was published in 2013 by ECW Press. The novel alternates perspectives between Sam, a man who has recently begun sprouting wings, and Lilah.[1]

Leduc is the communications and development coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity in Brampton, Ontario.[2][3] FOLD is Canada's first festival for diverse authors and stories.[4]

In 2020, Leduc's non-fiction book, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space was published by Coach House Books.[5] The book discusses representations of disability in fairy tales.[6] Disfigured is part memoir and explores Leduc's personal experiences as a disabled person.[7] Leduc was interested in challenging the idea that disability is "synonymous with an unhappy ending".[8] She began writing it after walking in the forest in 2018 and considering how forests, the setting of many fairy tales, are often inherently inaccessible to disabled individuals.[9]

Leduc's 2021 novel, The Centaur's Wife grew out of a short story of the same name that she wrote in 2014.[10] Leduc originally thought the story would be a novella.[11] Between 2016 and 2019, she re-wrote the novel four times.[10] The Centaur's Wife builds on the themes and ideas of Disfigured insofar as it is a fairy tale that centres disability and difference.[12] The book is dedicated to Leduc's friend Jess, who died in 2019 shortly after the completion of the manuscript.[11]

In 2022, Leduc was a Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer in Residence with the Hamilton Public Library.[13] Leduc's next book, Wild Life, is set to be published in 2024.[14]

Leduc was born in British Columbia.[9] She has congenital cerebral palsy and as a young child developed a limp as a consequence of an operation to remove a cyst from her brain.[15] Leduc also has spastic hemiplegia.[8]

Leduc currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario.[9]

• The Miracles of Ordinary Men (2013)[1]
• Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (2020)[3]
• The Centaur's Wife (2021)[16][17]

In 2015, Leduc was a finalist for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Fiction.[9] Leduc's short story, "All This, and Heaven Too", was long-listed for the 2019 CBC short story prize.[18] Disfigured was nominated for a 2021 Aurora Award in the category Best Related Work[19] and was nominated in the non-fiction category at the 28th annual Hamilton Literary Awards.[20] It was also nominated in the non-fiction category at the 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards.[21] The Centaur's Wife is a finalist for the Ontario Library Associations' 2022 Evergreen Awards.[22]