Woman, Watching

Merilyn Simonds was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1949 and grew up in Brazil. Educated at the University of Western Ontario, she has worked as a freelance writer, magazine editor and, since 1991, has devoted herself full-time to writing. Simonds has published 10 books and numerous magazine articles on subjects such as the environment, games, and war. She has amassed a number of writing awards including the Canadian Science Writers' Award for magazine journalism in 1990, and the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, shortlisted, for The Convict Lover: A True Story, in 1996. One of her best-known books is The (New) Games Treasury, which is an update of the 1993 edition in which she outlines the strategies, rules, and traditions of more than 300 board, piece, mind, and outdoor games, ranging from the familiar to the exotic.

Merilyn Simonds resides in Kingston, Ontario with writer Wayne Grady. She is a regular on the Canadian Broadcasting Company's radio show "Basic Black."

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