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Margaret Hollingsworth
Toronto-based playwright, short-story
writer and novelist Margaret Hollingsworth was born in Sheffield, England
in 1942, and grew up in London, where she won a national playwriting
competition at the age of sixteen. Prior to immigrating to Canada in
1968, she worked as an actor, librarian and journalist, and also taught
in Italy and Japan. Hollingsworth completed a Bachelor's Degree in
Psychology at Lakehead University and spent four years in Thunder Bay
where she was chief librarian at the municipal library. She then earned
a Master's in Fine Arts, Theatre and Creative Writing from the University
of British Columbia in 1974, and has since taught writing at David Thompson
University in Nelson, and from 1992 to 2003 at the University of Victoria,
where she is now Professor Emerita.
Hollingsworth's full-length plays
include Mother Country (1980), Ever Loving (1981),
War Babies (nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award),
Alma Victoria (1990), In Confidence (1994) and Blowing
Up Toads (1996), revised in 1998 as Commonwealth Games. Hollingsworth's
short plays include Bushed, Operators, Alli Alli Oh
and Islands. Hollingsworth has written a number of radio dramas
and has also written extensively for television and screen.
Hollingsworth has also published a collection
of short stories titled Smiling Under Water (1981), and in 2003,
a novel, Be Quiet, which features little-documented periods in
the life of the Canadian painter Emily Carr. She has also published
"Why We Don't Write" (Canadian Theatre Review, 1985), a much-studied
essay which underscores the absence of women's contributions to Canadian
theatre.
The playwright has won three ACTRA awards
for radio plays, a Floyd S. Chalmers Award, a Dora Mavor Moore Award
for drama, and a Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for drama. She has
also been playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, at Concordia
University, and the University of Western Ontario.
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