About shawna lemay
Shawna Lemay is the author Apples on a Windowsill (2024), essays about art, the creative life, and still life. She has also published the novel: Everything Affects Everyone (fall 2021), brief essays: The Flower Can Always Be Changing (shortlisted for the 2019 Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction), and the novel, Rumi and the Red Handbag which made Harper’s Bazaar’s #THELIST (must-reads for Fall 2015), the “Most Anticipated” list on the popular Canadian book website, 49th Shelf, and was selected for Maria Shriver's fall reading club. Nathalie Atkinson chose Rumi and the Red Handbag for Fall's Must-Read Fashion Books in the Globe and Mail.
All the God-Sized Fruit, her first book, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Calm Things: Essays was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. She has an M.A. in English from the University of Alberta.
She writes a blog titled Transactions with Beauty.
Her photography will be featured in an exhibition titled “Exchanging Glances,” along with the acclaimed Liane Neves which will be presented in Porto Alegre, Brazil and in Edmonton, Alberta in spring of 2024.
Shawna lives in Edmonton with her husband, Robert Lemay, a visual artist.
Her essay, “The Painter’s Wife vs The Poet’s Husband: Portrait of a Marriage” can be read at LitHub.
CBC featured her photo essay “A photographer’s love letter to Edmonton” in a First Person article.