When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction. Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally. Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter. Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries.
