Margaret Laurence

ML was a mid-twentieth-century Canadian who began to publish while resident in Africa, putting her gift at the service of preserving oral folk literature through translation and adaptation. Already a journalist, she next turned her hand to essays, short stories, and travel writing. She is best known for her series of Manawaka novels: explorations of the lives of women from a closely imagined prairie community, whose experience takes in the whole span of her century.