Ann Diamond

Diamond, Ann

Ann Diamond, poet, short-story writer, novelist (b at Montréal, Qué 11 April 1951). Ann Diamond earned a BA at Concordia University and studied created writing at Goddard College. She published her first book of poems, Lil, in 1977. Her other poetry collections include A Nun's Diary (1984), a series of prose poems that explore a nun's marriage to God and the relationship between sexuality and spirituality. Robert Lepage wrote a stage adaptation of A Nun's Diary, titled Echo, which premiered in Montréal in 1989. The poems in Diamond's Terrorist Letters (1992) offer a wide-ranging critique of Western society.

Ann Diamond also writes fiction. Mona's Dance (1988), a novel narrated by a female writer, fantastically recounts the picaresque adventures of a group of eccentrics living in a Montréal neighbourhood. Her distinctive narrative blurring of realism and surrealism is also evident in her short stories, collected in Snakebite (1989) and Evil Eye (1994), which often feature female characters burdened by painful relationships. Evil Eye won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Diamond's 2000 novel, Dead White Males, is a surreal detective story. A mysterious atmosphere also pervades in Static Control (2005), in which the young protagonist searches for her estranged father and answers to her mother's death.

In her 2006 memoir, My Cold War (republished in 2008 under the title A Certain Girl), Ann Diamond recounts her childhood experiences in Montréal as an unwitting participant in secret mind-control experiments, allegedly sponsored by the American CIA.