Alison Wearing (born 1967) is a Canadian writer and performer most noted for her memoir and solo play, Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter. Early years and education Wearing was born in Peterborough, Ontario in 1967. Her mother and father were both pianists and Wearing speaks of music as her "mother tongue". Wearing's father, Joseph Wearing, was also a professor of Political Studies at Trent University. Alison Wearing left high school in Canada to study French at the University of Nantes. She returned to Canada to study music at the University of Western Ontario, then political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Marburg, Germany. Career Alison Wearing's writing career began with articles and stories written while living in Prague, where she taught English to members of Václav Havel's first post-revolutionary government of Czechoslovakia. Her first short story, Notes From Under Water, was published first in the Queen's Quarterly and then selected for the Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland and Stewart, 1994). Staring Down the Beast, a longform essay about travels in Serbia during the Balkan War, won the 1994 Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Travel Writing. Solitary Motion, an essay about travels in northwestern China, won the 1995 Western Canada Magazine Award 1st Prize, also for Travel Writing. Wearing's first book was the internationally acclaimed travel memoir, Honeymoon in Purdah (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000), her account of a trip to Iran. The Calgary Sun called it "the perfect travel memoir" and the Ottawa Citizen hailed it as "one of the best pieces of travel writing it has been my privilege to read in this, or any, millennium." The book was published in seven countries. After moving to central Mexico in 2002, Wearing turned her attention to the performing arts, singing, recording and touring with world/folk musician Jarmo Jalava, and studying dance and choreography. Her first solo play, Giving Into Light, combines literary chronicles with music and dance. It toured Canadian Fringe Festivals, where it won two Best of Fest awards, Best Drama, and was a finalist for Best Fringe Production of 2012 (CBC/CTV/CVV). Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter, is both a memoir (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2013) and a solo play. Autobiographical in nature, Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter tells the story of growing up with a gay father in Peterborough, Canada, in the 1980s. The memoir was nominated for the RBC/Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, shortlisted