MacDonald is the daughter of a member of Canada's military; she was born at an
air force base near
Baden-Baden,
West Germany. She is of partial
Lebanese descent through her mother. MacDonald won the
Commonwealth Writers Prize for her first novel,
Fall on Your Knees (1996), which was selected for
Oprah Winfrey's Book Club in January 2002. MacDonald received the
Governor General's Award for Drama, the
Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and the
Canadian Authors Association Drama Award for her play,
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). MacDonald hosted the
CBC documentary series
Life and Times for seven seasons. MacDonald also hosted CBC's flagship documentary program,
Doc Zone for eight seasons. She appeared in the films ''
I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and Better Than Chocolate'', among others. MacDonald's 2003 novel,
The Way the Crow Flies, was partly inspired by the
Steven Truscott case. Her third novel
Adult Onset was released in 2014 and has been translated into five languages. Her fourth novel
Fayne was published in 2022. She was the inaugural Mordecai Richler Reading Room Writer in Residence at
Concordia University, and she coaches students in the Acting and Playwriting Programs at the
National Theatre School of Canada. In 2008, MacDonald was awarded an
honorary doctorate of humanities by the
University of Windsor. In May 2015, MacDonald was the "big-name author" and "public face" of the inaugural Canadian Authors for Indies Day, organized to bring attention to
independent bookstores across the country. Nearly 100 stores and 270 authors participated in the nationwide event. In 2019, MacDonald was diagnosed with
seronegative rheumatoid arthritis, which affected every aspect of her life, including work. She finished her novel
Fayne while strapped to a chair in order to be able to type. Her illness caused the novel's completion to be delayed by a year. As of 2023, she is symptom-free. MacDonald is married to the Canadian playwright and theatre director
Alisa Palmer. ==Works==