[1] Graham won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction twice, for her first novel Swiss Sonata in 1938,[2] and for Earth and High Heaven in 1944.
At 19, she was a student at Smith College in Massachusetts, but dropped out and eloped with John McNaught, the son of her father's business partner.
[1] They divorced after two years, and Graham moved to the city of Westmount on the island of Montreal, where she became a close friend and associate of Hugh MacLennan, F. R. Scott, Thérèse Casgrain and Pierre Trudeau.
[5] Graham was also an outspoken activist against anti-Semitism and anti-French Canadian discrimination;[6] Earth and High Heaven depicted an interfaith romance between a Protestant woman from Montreal and a Jewish man from Northern Ontario.
[1] Graham's only published book after Earth and High Heaven was Dear Enemies, a non-fiction collection of her correspondence with journalist Solange Chaput-Rolland about English-French relations in Canada.