Amanda Leduc
2026-27 Canadian Writer-in-Residence
Amanda Leduc is an award-winning author and disability rights advocate
Amanda Leduc is a disabled Canadian writer. She is the author of DISFIGURED: ON FAIRY TALES, DISABILITY, AND MAKING SPACE, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Nonfiction. Her novel WILD LIFE was longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Giller Prize. Her earlier novels include THE CENTAUR’S WIFE (2021) and THE MIRACLES OF ORDINARY MEN (2013). Amanda’s essays and stories have appeared across Canada, the US and the UK, and she speaks across North America on accessibility, inclusion and disability in storytelling. She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Amanda's recent book
Wild Life, Penguin Random House Canada, 2025
Wild Life
Amanda Leduc's dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken.
In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race.
The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren't so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah's church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans-from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying. The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what's "human" and what's "animal."