Claire
Cameron
Claire Cameron’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Lenny Letter, and Salon, and she is a staff writer at The Millions. Her first novel, The Line Painter, won the 2008 Northern Lit Award from the Ontario Library Service and was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Crime Writing Award for best first novel. Her second novel, The Bear, was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the 2014 Northern Lit Award. Cameron lives in Toronto.
Award History
Jury Citation
“In Claire Cameron’s engrossing and inventive novel The Last Neanderthal, the narratives of two females — one human, one Neanderthal, both separated by 40,000 years of history — are masterfully linked by a mysterious archeological find. This novel posits new questions surrounding the commodification of science, the emotional road to parenthood, and the evolutionary roots of our most basic drives. The struggles for survival in both storylines are rendered with empathy, and manage to prove that our worldly problems — whether modern or ancestral — have always been essentially the same. With great sophistication, The Last Neanderthal seeks out that which makes us human and the result is feminist literature of the highest order.” — 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Michael Christie, Christy Ann Conlin, and Tracey Lindberg)
