a show business giantess, grew out of Swan's work in performance art during the 1970s. Controversy Swan's novels are no strangers to controversy. A Canadian customs' official once confiscated The Wives of Bath at the Canadian border because he said it was obscene and shouldn't be read in Canada. By then the novel had already been nominated for Ontario's Trillium and the Guardian Fiction prize. Swan herself has been involved in literary disputes. She once asked The Globe and Mail fiction critic William French to resign on television because he criticized the apocalyptic ending of The Last of the Golden Girls as "unrealistic". Swan argued that literary realism is itself an artificial construct and not realistic in the sense French meant. 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. In 2016, the allegations of sexual assault against Galloway couldn’t be substantiated by Justice Mary Boyd. In 2021, Justice Elaine Adair ruled against anti-SLAPP motions brought by 11 defendants in Galloway’s defamation trial, allowing the defamation trial to continue. Teaching Swan has taught creative writing workshops all over Europe and recently retired from teaching creative writing as an Associate Professor of Humanities at York University to focus on her books. She currently mentors creative writing students for the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph and teaches in the Correspondence Program at Humber College. In 1999–2000, she was awarded the Millennial Robarts Chair in Canadian Studies. As chair, she hosted the successful Millennial Wisdom Symposium in Toronto featuring artists and social scientists debating the ways the past is recreated in popular culture and what wisdom the past has to offer as we move into the new century. The symposium was inspired by her research into her book about Casanova. Politics She was chair of the Writers' Union of Canada (2007–2008) and brought in a new benefits deal for Canadian writers. She is also a member of Community Air, a group of Toronto citizens opposed to the expansion of the Island Airport. Works Books Unfit For Paradise (1981) The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983) The Last of the Golden Girls (1989) The Wives of Bath (1993) Stupid Boys Are Good To Relax With (1996) What Casanova Told Me (2004) The Western Light (2012) The Dead Celebrities Club