Biography
Hilda Kay Grant was born in 1910 in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia of English parents. She attended Yarmouth Academy and later studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York. During the Second World War, she worked as a secretary in Montreal and Toronto, and In 1945 married fellow Nova-Scotian Joseph Howe Grant, a professional engineer. Together they lived first in Toronto and later in Kleinberg north of the city. She disliked being called Hilda and was known to all by her maiden name of Kay.
During her years in Toronto, she was an active member of both the Heliconian Club and the Canadian Authors' Association and an inspiring mentor to many writers and painters. When the American publishing firm of Abelard-Schuman had a Canadian subsidiary, she was its fiction editor and oversaw many Canadian writers into print.
Kay didn't publish her first book, The Salt Box, until her 40s and continued writing for less than twenty years. Written under the pseudonym "Jan Hilliard", the Salt Box won the prestigious Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor in 1952. The Salt Box was followed by A View of the Town. Miranda and The Jameson Girls were both novels of reminiscence, the latter about high-jinks in the family of a dying rum-runner, which caused some controversy in her home-town. Dove Cottage was based on the author's own house outside the city, and Morgan's Castle was set in the fictitious village of Greenwood in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario. As the New York Times wrote at the time, "Few such credible and practical murderers have flourished in fiction. Miss Hilliard persuades one that they are commoner in life… writes a sure sense of atmosphere". Morgan's Castle was Kay Grant's last novel, although she published three subsequent works of non-fiction under her own name. "Robert Stevenson, engineer and sea-builder", was a biography of the lighthouse builder and grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. She received a Canadian Centennial Commission grant to research and write Samuel Cunard, and was a Canada Council Award recipient. She also published short stories and poetry in such magazines as Maclean's, Chatelaine and Canadian Poetry.
A lifelong gardener, even when limited to a balcony in her later years, she co-authored Small city gardens with William S. Brett in 1967. She soon left writing forever, returning to her first artistic interest of painting, and in her later years was recognized as an accomplished watercolorist. She often supplied illustrations for her own books.
She died on Saturday 11 May 1996 at her home in Toronto and her cremated remains were interred in the Grant family plot in Riverside Cemetery, New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.
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