Her novels include The Biggest Modern Woman in the World (1983), The Last of The Golden Girls (1989), The Wives of Bath (1993), What Casanova Told Me (2004), and The Western Light (2012).
[2] The Wives of Bath was made into the film Lost and Delirious in 2001, starring Piper Perabo, Jessica Paré, and Mischa Barton.
Her first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, about a Canadian giantess related to Swan who exhibited with PT Barnum, is being made into a television series.
An early short story by Swan was deemed plagiarism by her Grade Seven teacher who said the writing was too good to have been written by a young girl.
Swan later worked as a reporter for several Toronto daily newspapers before turning to magazine freelance and novel writing.
Gender is often a theme in her earlier books, which examined the dilemma of inhabiting a female body in a male-dominated Western culture.
One critic called her "a contemporary Charles Dickens” while another critic, The New Yorker writer James Wood, said her novels belong to the category of "the avant-garde of content", a term Wood uses to describe his belief that the progressive development of fiction writing now centres on the subject matter a writer chooses to explore.
The story follows hedge fund whale, Dale Paul, a witty, self-absorbed rogue and raconteur who is sent to an upstate New York white collar jail on multiple counts of fraud for gambling away US military pensions.
Promising himself to earn back his son's previously gambled inheritance, Dale Paul dreams up an illegal lottery for his fellow inmates based on the death of old and frail celebrities.
What Casanova Told Me was made into Canada's first five-minute book short by film producer Judith Keenan.
It also inspired the song "What Casanova Told Me" by Albertan folk singer Cori Brewster who recorded it on her 2007 album Large Bird Leaving.
Swan's 1993 novel The Wives of Bath, a darkly humorous tale about a murder in a girls' boarding school, was a finalist for the UK's Guardian Fiction Prize and Ontario's Trillium Book Award.
A feature film based on The Wives of Bath was released in the summer of 2001 in the U.S. and Canada under the title Lost and Delirious.
Swan's other novels include The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983), based on a true-life ancestor, a giantess who exhibited with P.T.
[10] It is currently being made into a television series by Temple Street Productions with Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch adapting the book for screen.
[11] The Last of the Golden Girls (1989), about the sexual awakening of young women in Ontario cottage country, was originally published in 1989, and recently reissued in hardcover.
In the fall of 1993, a theatrical dramatization of The Wives of Bath was performed in Toronto, Chicago and New York with the Canadian authors Barbara Gowdy and Eric McCormack.
Swan was one of the signatories in the controversial University of British Columbia letter asking for due process for Steven Galloway, a UBC creative writing professor accused of sexual assault.