Howard Norman is an American novelist, translator, and educator, born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1949. Although he is American, much of his fiction is situated in Atlantic Canada and other northern settings. His writing ranges across novels, short stories, memoir, children’s literature, and work shaped by sustained engagement with Cree and Inuit oral traditions.
Norman’s first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were National Book Award finalists. His later fiction includes The Museum Guard, Devotion, What Is Left the Daughter, My Darling Detective, and Come to the Window. The Haunting of L. completes the Canadian trilogy begun by The Bird Artist and continued by The Museum Guard; it follows a young assistant drawn into the dangerous world of a portrait photographer in Manitoba and Halifax.
His translation work has also been central to his career. In 1978, he received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems of the Swampy Cree Indians. Norman received a Whiting Award in fiction in 1985 and a Guggenheim Fellowship; he is also a recipient of a Lannan Award in fiction. The University of Maryland lists him as Emeritus Professor of English.
This profile is awaiting source review; collected books are already linked below.
