Billie Livingston is a fiction writer, poet, and sometime essayist. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, and has since lived in Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich, Los Angeles, and London, England. Her first employment was filling the dairy coolers in a Macs Milk. She went on to work varying lengths of time as a file clerk, receptionist, cocktail waitress, model, actor, chocolate sampler, booth host at a plumber’s convention, and Garfield the Cat at a kitty litter conference.
Livingston was the 2017 winner of the Writer’s Trust Engel/Findlay Award. She has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, the Journey Prize for fiction and the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry. Greedy Little Eyes, a collection of short stories, was cited by The Globe and Mail as one of 2010's best books, and subsequently won the CBC's Bookie Award as well as the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Best Short Story Collection. Her 2012 novel, One Good Hustle, was nominated for the Giller Prize and became a year’s best book selection for several publications including The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine, and January Magazine. In 2014, her short story, “Sitting on the Edge of Marlene,” was adapted to a feature film by director, Ana Valine and starred Suzanne Clément, Paloma Kwiatkowski, and Callum Keith Rennie.
She lives with her husband, actor Tim Kelleher, in Vancouver.
At MacDowell, Billie completed the first draft of her story collection, "You Sound Tiny," to be published by Random House Canada in 2007. Her second novel, "Cease to Blush," will be published in April of 2006.
