Hilda Kay Grant

During the Second World War she worked as a secretary in Montreal and Toronto and in 1945 married fellow Nova Scotian Joseph Howe Grant, a professional engineer.

Written under the pseudonym Jan Hilliard, semi-autobiographical The Salt Box won the prestigious Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1952 and garnered strong reviews in numerous Canadian and American newspapers.

[8][9] The Jameson Girls of 1956 is an amusing account of four daughters gathered to the bedside of their dying father, a hot-tempered and tyrannical Niagara River rum runner.

[10][11] The next novel, Dove Cottage, inspired by the author's own house outside Toronto, was described by The New Yorker as "an unashamed and thoroughly delightful escape story about a domesticated, downtrodden Canadian bank clerk, Homer Flynn, who unexpectedly inherits a large fortune ... (and) takes advantage of his new-found wealth to do exactly as he pleases.

"[12] Published in 1960 Miranda, according to the New York Times, "... is a loving book...It is also -- and here imagination ceases -- a letter-perfect rending of day-by-day living in a Nova Scotian town in the Nineteen Twenties.

She received a Canadian Centennial Commission grant to research and write Samuel Cunard, Pioneer of the Atlantic Steamship and was also a Canada Council Award recipient.