Heather Mallick - Life and Career

Life and Career

Mallick was born in Norway House, Manitoba and raised in the northern Ontario town of Kapuskasing and in other remote communities where her father worked as a physician. Mallick attended the University of Toronto where she received a bachelor's and Master of Arts degrees in English Literature. She also earned a bachelor's degree in Journalism from Ryerson University.

After graduation, she was employed at the Canadian financial daily newspaper Financial Post where she first worked as a copy editor and later became a news editor.

She first came to public notice in Canada during the 1990s as the book review editor and writer for the Sunday edition of the Toronto Sun, where she won two Canadian Newspaper Association National Newspaper Awards for critical writing in 1994 and feature writing in 1996. Mallick later wrote for The Globe and Mail where her left-of-centre political opinion column "As If" was a regular part of the paper's Saturday edition until December 2005. She also wrote major and minor pieces for the newspaper on lifestyle and other issues. Stylistically, Mallick has been compared to writers such as the American commentators Maureen Dowd and Molly Ivins and the British commentator Julie Burchill. She joined the Toronto Star in August 2010.

Mallick's first book, Pearls in Vinegar, was published in September, 2004 in Canada. She published a collection of new essays for Knopf Canada in April, 2007 entitled Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life.

Mallick is married to Stephen Petherbridge, a senior British/Canadian journalist.

In October 2007, Mallick gave the 2nd annual Mel Hurtig Lecture on the Future of Canada, at the University of Alberta.