About

Hannah Calder grew up in England, in small towns on the southeast coast. At 15, she immigrated to Vernon, BC, and attended her last years of high school there. During high school, along with being an avid letter writer, she wrote poems and kept a diary filled with poems, rants, drawings, and lists. For more on her early writing days, you can listen to her on the podcast, Writers Read Their Early Sh*t

After high school, Hannah spent time traveling to work and working to travel. Around completing a BA and MA in English, she lived and worked in the US, England, Spain, and South Korea. While working on her MA at Simon Fraser University, she started her first novel, More House, which she went on to publish in 2009 with New Star Books.
 

Hannah’s second novel, Piranesi’s Figures, was released in 2016. Her publisher describes the book as “A dense witches-brew of storytelling, a feminist-tinged fairy-tale that drapes the dirtiest secrets of domestic wreckage and illicit love in fancy dress and commands them to twirl around for our amusement."

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Turning away from novel-writing temporarily, Hannah's next project involved co-directing and co-producing a documentary about small town writers with Curtis Emde and Silmara Emde, which they released in 2022. Information about Why We Write: Poets of Vernon is available here. To watch the film, visit the Knowledge Network.

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Poet and screenwriter kevin mcpherson eckhoff adapted Piranesi’s Figures for the screen in 2024. Kevin and Hannah are currently seeking producers for the screenplay. If you are interested in reading the pitch or screenplay, please contact us.

In fall 2024, New Star Books released Hannah’s third novel, Hester in Sunlight.

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“Yes, that Hester — the fallen woman who bore the Scarlet Letter while raising her daughter on her own. She is looking back, across that clearing, and 150 years, at her fateful lover. Less a re-telling or transposition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic than a re-purposing of the materials to tell a different version, Hester in Sunlight, revolving around the relationships between the (unnamed) narrator; her husband Sonny and gender fluid child Luna; her sister Dani and her two kids; and their parents, is a heady and stimulating riff on contemporary motherhood and parenting. ‘The narrator in my novel has OCD,’ novelist Hannah Calder says. ‘The book is an exploration of what OCD thinking can do to a classic, a meditation on what thought — often unwanted — can do in the gaps that naturally occur in literature.’”

Hannah is currently working on a novel about a fictional meeting between Joni Mitchell and her fictionalized mother in Biba, a London clothing store. The exchange takes place in 1970 on the same day that Mitchell performed at the BBC.

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Hannah lives in Vernon, B.C., where she works as a freelance workshop facilitator and manuscript consultant.  After working for over a decade as a professor of English and Creative Writing at Okanagan College, she recently started a business, Writing for All, that offers expressive writing workshops, writing mentorship, and manuscript consultation services to her community and online.  More info coming soon!  

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