In 1982 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. From 1975-1977, she served on the City of Toronto Book Award Committee (an award she won in 1981 for Lunatic Villas) and the Canadian Book and Periodical Development Council. She was the first chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada (1973–74) and helped found the Public Lending Right Commission. Includes a reading group guide.Ĭanadian novelist, short-story and children's fiction writer, Marian Engel was a passionate activist for the national and international writer’s cause. As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. What she discovers will change her life forever.

Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the island’s past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Eager to investigate the estate’s curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other a bear. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. The winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Marian Engel’s most famous – and most controversial – novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship.

Bear by marian eagle