Ali Bryan is an award-winning novelist and creative nonfiction writer who explores the what-ifs, the wtfs and the wait-a-minutes of every day. Her first novel Roost, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and was the official selection of One Book Nova Scotia. Her second novel, The Figgs, was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and has been optioned for TV by Sony Pictures. Her essays have been longlisted for the CBC Canada Writes Creative Nonfiction prize, shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Awards Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award and nominated for both Best-of-the-Net and the Pushcart Prize. She won the 2020 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story and is a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards Emerging Artist recipient. Her debut YA novel, The Hill, was released in 2021 and was longlisted for the 2021 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. The second book in the series, At Sea, is forthcoming from Dottir Press in 2025. Her short-form work has been published in literary journals and magazines in Canada, the US and the UK and has longlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her fourth novel, Coq was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and won the 2024 BPAA Trade Fiction Book of the Year. Of her fifth novel, The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships, The New York Times noted “Bryan’s dark comedy is part antic farce, part character study and altogether a thoroughly fun read.” Her most recent novel for teens, Takedown, was released in May 2024 and is a Forest of Reading White Pine Award finalist. Bryan has served as the Author in Residence at the Banff Centre, the Calgary Public Library and as the Edna Staebler Laurier University digital Writer-in-Residence. She has a BComm in Marketing from Saint Mary’s University and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing from Humber College. In 2022, she was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal. Born and raised in Halifax, she lives in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on Treaty 7 Territory, where she used to have a wrestling room in her garage and regularly got choked out by her family. In addition to writing, Bryan operates Parlay Manuscript Services with her business partner, Sandra McIntyre.
Thrift shops, mixed martial arts, survival shows, pigeons, bagpipes, mountains, memoirs, NOFX, war history, Survivor, graffiti, the Olympics, France, tumbleweeds, lifting weights, soccer, peanut butter, abandoned places, walking her dog Lemon, watching her kids play sports, the paintings of Kim Dorland and Jean Smith and the films of Wes Anderson are a few of her favourite things. Before turning to writing full time, Ali worked in marketing and communications, arts management and as a personal trainer.
Artist Statement
I write for and about the people. I write about the what-ifs, the wtfs and the wait-a-minutes of every day. I write about the downtrodden, the broken-hearted, the vulnerable. About lovers and losers, mothers and mutineers. I write about prisoners with daddy issues, and sad auctioneers and single dads and feminist kids. I write about immigrant shopkeepers and big men in cargo shorts and old women soccer players and abusive grandpas. I write about me. I write you.
Juxtaposition and ambivalence influence the genre I use to tell story, so I write poems about wrestling and short prose about big men. Long form creative nonfiction to reveal tiny truths, full-length novels to document single days. Quick personal essays that burn slow. Other people’s memoirs.
My work is strongly influenced by philosophy, existentialism, cognitive psychology, biology, neuroscience and geography. Dialogue, humour and defamiliarization are my strengths. I write stories that aren’t about issues but exist because of them. Thematically, my work explores the art and horror of being human, and the grief of living and losing. Hope and despair are at the core of my storytelling. I write what rattles, arouses, enrages, enlightens, and disturbs me. I write about the fight to survive, the fight to exist, to be heard, to be understood, to be valued. To be. My priority as an artist is to challenge perspectives, generate connections and make people feel seen.
Writer Cathal Kelly says, “it’s the banalities, that when you string a few thousand of them together creates a life.” It’s also through the banalities that big ideas become accessible, universal, and relatable. So, my stories take place at karaoke competitions and estate sales and school playgrounds and my childhood home. I’m provoked by the mundane and the ordinary and pairing humor with pathos is a hallmark of my work. “It’s much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It’s harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears.” (Fran Lebowitz). I do both.
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Get in touch!
Ali is represented by Stacey Kondla at The Rights Factory.
For general inquiries, media queries, interview or event requests, workshop and event appearances, or rights inquiries, please email my agent.
