Montreal high school students that was banned under Swan's editorship. Swan later worked as a reporter for several Toronto daily newspapers before turning to magazine freelance and novel writing. On 27 March 1969, she married Barry Haywood in the boardroom of The Telegram, where Swan was the education reporter. They had one daughter, Samantha Haywood (1973–) and the two were later divorced. Swan's longtime partner is Canadian publisher Patrick Crean. Career Swan is a writer and journalist who was also a performance artist from 1975 to 1979, performing odes on subjects like self-pity and figure skater Barbara Ann Scott called Queen of the Silver Blades. But she is best known for her critically praised fiction, which has been published in twenty countries. 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. Swan's latest novels have expressed a young woman's longing for fatherly love. Susan's latest novel is The Dead Celebrities Club, published in 2019 by Cormorant books. The Globe and Mail called it "a timely tale of greed and corruption, worthy of the age". 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. The novel was born out of Swan's obsession at the time with con men and whether they can change. Swan's novel, The Western Light, is a prequel to The Wives of Bath. The story revolves around the life of young Mouse Bradford who is torn between love for her father and the charismatic asylum inmate John Pilkie, an ex-Red Wings hockey player, serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife and baby girl. Set in Madoc's Landing, a fictional Ontario town on Georgian Bay, The Western Light weaves in