Pauline Holdstock is a British-Canadian novelist, essayist and short fiction writer with a focus on historical fiction. Born and raised in England, she came to Canada in 1974, and resides in Victoria, British Columbia.After a ten-year teaching career in the UK, the Caribbean, and Canada, she wrote her first novel. The Blackbird's Song (1989) launched her professional full-time writing career when it was shortlisted for the Books in Canada/W.H. Smith Best First Novel Award and subsequently reviewed favourably in the UK. She is the author of ten works of fiction and non-fiction in addition to reviews and articles for national newspapers and for websites. Her books have been published in the UK, the US, Portugal, Brazil, Australia and Germany as well as in Canada. Her novel Beyond Measure bro