Her Life
The daughter of Canadian diplomats, Jane Bow grew up in Canada, in New York City during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ‘Better Dead Than Red,’ campaign in the early 1950s, in populist Generalissimo Franco’s fascist Spain, in England where she attended a boarding school that could have come out of a Dickens novel, and in Cold War Prague.
Returning to Canada, she became a journalist, covering how our legal system works in Ontario’s remote northern Indigenous communities, flying into Mexico’s Chiapas rainforest to write the story of a Canadian woman who had married the son of a Lacandon tribe’s chief. Then Jane found love. And fiction.
She has raised two children with her husband, with whom she now lives, loves and drinks wine in Victoria, B.C.
Her Work
Three of Jane’s first four novels, all published by small Canadian presses, were awards finalists:
- Homeless was shortlisted for an international Rubery Book Award in 2024 and for Quattro Books’ Ken Klonsky Novella Award.
- Cally’s Way, set in Crete, earned a feature review in Kirkus Reviews Magazine, reached #2 on an Edmonton bestseller list, and was presented to Britain’s Folkestone Book Festival in 2014.
- The Oak Island Affair was a 2008 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in two categories.
- Dead And Living was short listed for Canada’s Arthur Ellis First Novel Award and selected for a Carleton University literature & law course in 2002.
- Jane has also published short stories and had two plays produced.
She has given presentations and readings of her work in Canada, the U.S., Britain and India.
Healing Her MS
When Jane was diagnosed with Primary Progressive MS in 2005 no drugs existed to halt the disease’s destruction. So she started exploring and experimenting with the solar/mind/body energies that fuel our experience of living. Discoveries she has made, first in Crete, a home of her heart, mean that two decades later she is still walking, swimming, playing and writing.
Her doctors can not explain this but she will tell you that the power of focussed attention, awareness and intention can amalgamate the incredible forces of sunlight and love to produce healing in the face of life’s challenges. The intimate awareness that comes through this learning is the bedrock of her fiction.