About Dorris Heffron
Born in Noranda, Quebec, Dorris Heffron has an Honours B.A.(1967),and M.A.(1969) in Literature and Philosophy from Queen's University, Canada. Heffron lived in Oxford, England from 1968-1980 where she was a tutor for Oxford University and The Open University, giving courses in Literature. While there, she wrote three novels about teenagers, published by Macmillan, London. Internationally acclaimed, they are regarded as pioneers in the genre of young adult fiction. They were translated and put on highschool courses in Europe, Japan and Canada. During sabbaticals, she taught creative writing at the University of Malaysia and resided while writing and teaching, in Holland, France and Cape Breton Island. Heffron returned to Toronto in 1980.
She has served on the National Council of The Writers' Union, the Board of Directors of PEN Canada, The Writers Trust of Canada, the Toronto Arts Council and the Board of Directors of the Native Men's Residence. She has been a library writer-in-residence and book reviewer for the Globe and Mail
Dorris Heffron is a past Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (June 2013 - June 2014)                     Â
Heffron's first adult's novel, the popular, A Shark in the House is about a woman dentist in Toronto who reluctantly finds herself involved in the aboriginal standoff at Oka. Told with humour and compassion, it is a story of love and striving, death and survival, of people on both sides of the barricades.
Heffron's new novel, City Wolves is the story of Canada's first woman veterinarian who becomes the notorious 'Dog Doctor of Halifax' in the 1890s and winds up in the Klondike gold rush tending sled dogs. At the heart of the novel is the ancient story of how wolves became sled dogs. Uniquely Canadian and profoundly universal, City Wolves subtly reveals the human nature of wolves and the wolf-life nature of humans.
Dorris Heffron lives on a property called Little Creek Wolf Range, two hours north of Toronto, Canada.