Isabel Huggan spent her childhood in Elmira, a small southern Ontario town where her father worked as a manager for the Canadian branch of an American chemical company.
In the mid-1970s she began publishing poetry and short stories in Canadian literary magazines; in 1977, after leaving her job, she gave birth to a daughter.
In 1980, the family moved to Ottawa and she met with Oberon Press editors who published her entire eight-story sequence as The Elizabeth Stories (1984).
The posting in Kenya lasted for three years and was followed by a three-year assignment in France, which led to a five-year stay at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
After the death of her husband in 2011, Huggan stayed at Mas Blanc and turned a stone barn on her property into a retreat for writers.
In April 2004, it was awarded the prestigious Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction in Canada, and in Australia was for some time on the bestseller list.
Readers find their own experiences mirrored in the memoir, as Huggan's life story reminds them of their own: moving from one house or city or country to another, making home over and over again – this is common to more people now than ever before.
In the U.S. her work has appeared in Utne Reader and Confetti; in Denmark, Kunapipi; in Australia, in Eureka Street and Meanjin, and in Britain, in Good Housekeeping and Women & Home Magazine.