From Melbourne, Australia, where he taught himself to read one afternoon in a dug-out hidey hole, and resolved to become a writer when/if he grew up, Simon lives in Toronto The Good, Canada. He’s written his whole life, so far.

He’s been published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books (two collections, favourably reviewed), and had poems in The Bulletin, Poetry Australia, The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Parchment, Mainline, Urchin, Scarp: New Arts and Writing, The Grist Mill and an anthology called These Loved These Hated Lands. His stories and articles have been published widely, from Ski Australia to Ski Canada, plus many weird short stories, and cranky letters to the editor. He’s written songs, music for brass quintet, revue skits, and had a prize-winning play, Living Room performed.

He prefers reading to actual work, and spent lazy years at Sydney University, Oxford (on scholarship) and The University of New Brunswick, collecting degrees in this and that. His theses were on ‘Unconscious Motivation’, on ‘Concept-Formation in Schizophrenia’, and on ‘The Willing Victim: Character and Technique in the work of Jean Rhys’.

Really he prefers being active to reading, has run five marathons and won a triathlon. At Oxford he stroked the college crew (no, that’s rowing at the rudder end, closest to the . . . ah, cox) and represented the college in tennis and swimming, and the university in gymnastics, running, and pole vaulting, rising to an alarming height on his first and only attempt. In a bicycle racing phase he was New Brunswick champion, and in cross country skiing competed at the Canada Games. In alpine (downhill) skiing he’s the current Ontario champion in his age class (codger) and placed third at the Nationals.

He really prefers travel to sports, and once hitch-hiked from New York to Panama. Strongly preferring to avoid monotonous work, he has been gainfully employed as an advertising researcher, psychologist, consultant, racing driver and instructor, university and college professor, labourer, professional actor and modern dancer, fourth trumpet in a big dance band—and, the whole time, writer.

He’s been happily married since 1970 with no children and a cat, Hoos-Wah, who thinks she’s a puppy.

Wild Women is his fourth novel, and oddly the first one set in Canada, though he’s lived here since a two-year appointment in 1970 that stretched out rather.

Simon Leigh
227 River Street
Toronto, ON M5A 3P9
Canada.

Phone: 416 960 0235
E-mail: simon@mycybernet.net

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