Walmsley, Ann

Ann Walmsley is the author of The Prison Book Club and a magazine journalist whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail Report on Business Magazine, Maclean’s and many other publications. She is the recipient of four National Magazine Awards, a Canadian Business Journalism Award and two International Regional Magazine awards. The Prison Book Club is her first book. It won the 2016 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and was longlisted for the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize and the 2016 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

Born in Picton, Ontario, Walmsley graduated with a degree in English literature from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, before pursuing a career in journalism as a magazine writer, book reviewer and editor. During her writing career, she has lived in Toronto, Paris, Westport CT, Dallas and London.

Intrigued by her parents’ membership in a local literary society called Tennyson Club, she founded her first book club at age nine. Since then, she has been a member of five other book clubs in Canada and the U.K. But it wasn’t until a friend invited her in 2010 to help with book selection for a prison book club that she found the material for a book that she herself would write.

Walmsley has two grown children and lives with her husband in Toronto.