Margaret Sweatman writes novels, stories, plays, song lyrics, poetry, libretti, essays. She's also a musician and performer.

Her novels have won the McNally Robinson and the Margaret Laurence Awards a couple of times, as well as the Rogers Writers Trust Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and the Carol Shields Award. Her plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance, and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, and the National Academy Orchestra, as well as with her own Broken Songs Band (vocals and harmonica).

       • Here's Margaret with the Broken Songs Band: https://dreamplay.ca/track/im-love-sleep-317

       • With her husband, composer Glenn Buhr, Margaret won a Genie Award 2005 for Best Song in Canadian Film. Here's the song, When Wintertime, from the film Seven Times Lucky: https://dreamplay.ca/node/229.

       • Here’s a link to the song cycle, Red Sea: music by Glenn Buhr, Margaret’s libretto, with Sarah Slean vocals and the NUMUS Chamber Orchestra: https://dreamplay.ca/node/130

Margaret is the author of the novels Fox, Sam and Angie, When Alice Lay Down with Peter, The Players, Mr. Jones, The Gunsmith’s Daughter, and the forthcoming Night Birds.

Night Birds, her seventh novel, is a story about gold mining, money laundering, and the subconscious. It’s a story about deception – of others and of oneself – set in folly architecture: an ox-bow on a prairie river; a derelict summer-home at a Canadian lake that resembles Carl Jung’s tower near Lake Zurich; and an open-pit gold mine near Roşia Montană, a village in Transylvania, Romania.

Margaret’s one-act play, Fracas, is the result of years of work with the wonderful choreographer/dancer/director, Marie-Josée Chartier and director Arne MacPherson. A video of Fracas, with Chartier, joined by actor Sébastien Labelle, and recorded live before an audience at Output Studio in Winnipeg is available here: https://dreamplay.ca/node/461

Margaret’s and Glenn Buhr’s work of musical theatre, Anna’s Dream Play, is a tragicomedy. Anna is the ruler of Scotland between the 12th and 13th centuries. The story is in a spiral of dreams set in a fantastical medieval Scotland, but the politics reflect our current vulnerability to imperial aggression from a more powerful neighbour. You can find 5 songs from the musical here: https://dreamplay.ca/node/462

Contact: margaretsweatman2@gmail.com

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    Here’s what people have said about Margaret Sweatman's novels.

• Night Birds (2026):

Margaret Sweatman continues to astonish as she breaks ground with each new book. In Night Birds, the ground is the earth itself — the hidden realm of buried riches beneath our feet. Caught in the aftermath of a Romanian gold mine’s collapse, Farrar, Clio, and their daughter Sydney each find themselves descending into a darkness both geological and human, their lives bound to a distant industrialist whose remorseless pursuit of the planet’s wealth poisons both land and spirit. Visionary and urgent.
— Thomas Wharton, author of Wolf, Moon, Dog

Margaret Sweatman’s stylish thriller Night Birds is a slow burn that sparks with suspense. Sweatman has a gift for mining the perfect detail, bringing not only her characters but her settings vividly to life. This is a fine novel, forged with rich prose and a poet’s sensibility.
— Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of The Almost Widow

Night Birds is a thrilling and spiralling tale, which brings echoes of LeCarre’s The Constant Gardener, combined with the pace of Wilbur Smith. Sweatman’s tightly drawn characters are trapped in the spin of very real-world events, and the complex ties that connect us all to the world of extraction and the villains and violence that can occupy the dark corners of that world. The writing is both sinewy and connective, her language seems to cleave dark earth from the very ground her characters are digging into.
— Jeremy Thomas Gilmer, author of This Rare Earth
 

• The Gunsmith’s Daughter (2022):

“I was thrilled by The Gunsmith’s Daughter, by how cinematic and engrossing it is, what big questions it asks.”
— Joan Thomas, author of Five Wives

“An astute and subtle interrogation of a young woman’s struggle to forge her own path amidst a bloody conflict and in the shadow of the sometimes wildly profitable business of other people’s suffering. Margaret Sweatman is a writer of deep emotional insight, and in Lilac Welsh she has created a vivid, complex character caught between warring currents of ambition and familial loyalty. There is a cold fire that burns through this novel.”
— Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

“In this beautifully written and tightly plotted novel, Margaret Sweatman gives us a searing look into ourselves. Lilac Welsh is faced with a moral dilemma. She loves her father but is conflicted about the way he makes his living – he makes guns that kill people. Set in the time of the Vietnam War, Lilac’s dilemma is Canada’s: we criticize U.S. foreign policy, even while our economic well-being remains entangled in America’s. The Gunsmith’s Daughter delivers uncomfortable home truths as sharply and poetically as George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man.”
— Wayne Grady, author of The Good Father

“… a gripping coming-of-age / adventure story of a young woman’s awakening into a world much larger and more dangerous and morally complex than she’d imagined.… a relentlessly engaging and suspenseful novel. The Gunsmith’s Daughter, possessing the forward thrust of a whodunit, makes for compulsive reading and is clearly the work of a seasoned writer who knows what she’s doing every step of the way.”
— Atlantic Books Today

“Throughout the novel, dialogue sparkles with authenticity and wit comparable to the novels of Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Bothers, French Exit). Sweatman’s unpredictable but convincing snippets of conversation go a long a long way in revealing the characters and their relationships, particularly the complex relationship between Lilac and her father.”
— The Winnipeg Free Press
 

• Mr. Jones (2014):

“Mr. Jones is suspenseful, evocative and astonishing in scope. Here is communism as it unfolds in Canada during the 1950s and 1960s, the repercussions of the cold war, espionage, and the explosive co-mingling of idealism and ambition. Margaret Sweatman writes all the dangerous fires – bravery, betrayal, loyalty and love. Prose as lyrical and transparent as Ondaatje, as politically astute and fiercely clear-eyed as Didion. This novel burns bright.”
— Lisa Moore, author of February and Caught

“The paranoid ’50s cracked open in unlikely places. Sleek, believable—essential too, like the missing pieces in a long abandoned puzzle.”
— Fred Stenson, author of The Great Karoo

“One thing is certain: Emmett Jones is a fascinating new protagonist on the Canadian literary scene.”
— Linda Diebel, Toronto Star

“Margaret Sweatman outdoes herself again in scope and skill level in Mr. Jones.”
— Elizabeth Hopkins, Winnipeg Free Press

“A story of the clash between private lives and politics at a time when it was impossible to separate the two.”
— Tom Jokinen, The Globe and Mail

“It is the relationships between her cast of characters that truly forms the arc of this story, their loyalties to one another as well as their betrayals.”
— Elin Thordarson, The Winnipeg Review

“Mr. Jones is an electric, compelling, scintillating read.”
— Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

“One of the pleasures of this novel is Sweatman’s vivid evocation of the fear and paranoia that pervaded the Cold War from 1946 to the early 1960s.”
— Bob Douglas, Critics at Large