Deborah Willis

Who is Deborah Willis?

Deborah Willis is a Canadian short story writer.

Daughter of Pauline and Gary Willis, she was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1982 and lived there until leaving to study at the University of Victoria. Her fiction has appeared in Grain, Event, PRISM international, and The Walrus. Her first book, Vanishing and Other Stories, published by Penguin, was named one of the Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2009, and was nominated for the BC Book Prize, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Victoria Butler Book Prize and the Governor General's Award. It was published in the United States by Harper Perennial in 2010 and translated into Hebrew and Italian. Deborah Willis has been a horseback riding instructor and a reporter, and worked as a bookseller in Victoria, British Columbia. She was Canadian Writer-in-Residence in the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary for the 2012-2013 academic year.

Commenting on Vanishing, Alice Munro has said "The emotional range and depth of these stories, the clarity and the deftness, is astonishing."